Does Cloud Adoption Increase Security?

Cybercriminals hack one small business every ten seconds in the UK. Cybercrime in the region is rising, causing business owners and C-suite executives sleepless nights trying to ensure data security. According to a 2022 cyber threat report, 81% of UK-based organisations have suffered more than one cyberattack in the past year.

The study also found that 73% of UK companies dealt with a ransomware incident, and 13% of the victims ended up paying a ransom. Affected entities incurred an average of $1.08 million to deal with a ransomware incident due to lost data and a lack of reliable data backup methods.

Various factors have contributed to the heightened risk of data breaches and cyberattacks in the UK. For example, the accelerated adoption of remote working strategies has caused many companies to fall victim to data breaches, with many reporting one data breach weekly. Unsurprisingly, hackers used corporate-owned servers as entry points when executing most attacks, with 37% of enterprises citing their internal servers as the cause of attacks.

Therefore, this leaves the question of whether migrating from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud increases security.

Turning to the Cloud for Enhanced Security

A cybersecurity breaches survey by the UK government found that smaller organisations lack a high level of internal cybersecurity expertise. As such, small and medium-sized businesses make cybersecurity decisions as part of the wider organisational initiatives.

For example, a small organisation involved in the survey said that it depends on its cloud provider to ensure secure data storage and robust data encryption mechanisms to protect the data from unauthorised access.

In addition, the organisation stated that its cloud adoption initiatives were driven by a desire to comply with regulations like the GDPR, which is harder to achieve in an on-premise data storage approach. It further alluded that cloud adoption means it does not have to budget for data security in its IT security budgets.

Prioritising Security in Cloud Migration

One of the gating factors in cloud migration initiatives is the perceived security threats and risks. Business leaders and IT experts often worry that cloud adoption could make them lose control of mission-critical applications and data. However, as more companies increase their investments in cloud solutions and gain more knowledge on the security advantages of migrating to the cloud, it has become clear that the cloud improves security. The primary reasons the cloud is more secure are the cloud infrastructure is security hardened and the shared cloud security model between an organisation and the cloud provider.

Nevertheless, contrary to what many perceive, enhanced cloud security is not given even with the top cloud providers like AWS. Therefore, it is equally imperative for an organisation to strategically invest in cloud security to identify and eliminate security gaps, unexpected threats, and security challenges arising from cloud users’ poor security hygiene. Thus, prioritising cloud security is vital due to the following reasons:

• Configuration methods, security policies, and frameworks created for on-premise infrastructure do not often work in a “lift and shift” cloud adoption model.

• The increased uptake of IoT systems deployed within the cloud environment expands the attack surface. Yet, many businesses don’t protect secure devices like loading dock portals, printers, and copiers from cloud security threats and vulnerabilities.

• Many organisations mistake that partnering with a cloud service provider means they no longer require implementing data security awareness programs or investing in appropriate security personnel and tools.

The Security Benefits of Adopting the Cloud

Protecting Against Ddos Attacks

DDoS attacks in the UK have increased in 2022, largely attributed to the Russia-Ukraine cyber war, with Kaspersky researchers noting that DDoS attacks have increased by 4.5 times in 2022 compared to 2021.

Attackers execute DDoS attacks by targeting internal servers and websites with huge traffic to prevent legitimate users from accessing critical resources resulting in company-wide IT disruptions.

As such, this can cause lost revenues, damaged brand reputation, and lost customer trust. Luckily, adopting the cloud can protect against DDoS attacks. Specifically, cloud computing networks comprise a suite of services implemented to identify, analyse, and monitor DDoS attacks.

The services detect incoming DDoS traffic, alert the relevant administrators, absorb the DDoS traffic effectively and distribute it across global points of presence, and provide post-attack analysis to inform mitigation measures to protect against future DDoS attacks.

Cloud-Based Protection And Support Convenience

Adopting cloud technologies provides you with a comprehensive IT and data security support system. Utilising cloud-based solutions provides the benefits of round-the-clock monitoring to identify security events as they emerge.

Managed cloud providers leverage advanced cloud security systems and highly-trained and equipped personnel to monitor your cloud environments 24/7.

Timely threat detection and mitigation protect data from unauthorised access, leakages, unauthorised modification, sharing, and misuse.

Furthermore, cloud providers are responsible for identifying outdated applications, software, and patches and updating them automatically to prevent hackers from exploiting them. Thus, this increases your IT uptime significantly, enabling you to deliver vital services without worrying about security breaches.  

Compliance with Regulatory Frameworks

Many organisations in the private and public sectors with a digital footprint have many regulatory frameworks to comply with to protect special data types, such as health and personally identifiable information.

These compliance regulations include the GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and the Data Protection Act. Tracking and ensuring compliance with an ever-increasing set of regulations in an on-premises set-up is tedious.

It increases the risks of non-compliance, opening up an organisation to security threats and heavy fines. By adopting cloud solutions, you can leverage the automated compliance tracking tools to identify and address compliance gaps to ensure full compliance.

In addition, some cloud solutions incorporate compliance by design for specific industry frameworks such that you can migrate and not be concerned that you have missed any compliance requirements.

Robust Data Encryption

The importance of data encryption cannot be underscored. Encrypting data at rest, in use, or transit is crucial to prevent malicious actors from accessing, using, or modifying it without authorisation.

Cloud data encryption is a proactive approach to protecting against data breaches or attacks while enabling organisations and users to leverage cloud computing benefits like big data analytics without placing the data at unnecessary risks.

More importantly, cloud adoption helps map the data movements and required data security requirements.

Hence, you can ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks stipulating data encryption as a mandatory requirement. Cloud service providers provide a variety of encryption measures to satisfy these data security requirements.

Cloud Adoption with Cloud Geeni can Enhance Security

Security can be a difficult landscape to navigate when you have multiple locations, staff members working from home and using their own devices during the working day.

With attacks becoming ever more sophisticated, Cloud Geeni is committed to deploying solutions that mitigate the risk for our clients and end users in a fully managed, private cloud environment. In addition, we offer a no-obligation audit of your current set-up, providing you with information you can use to inform future infrastructure decisions.

Cloud Geeni is keenly focused on cloud security, and our team are always on hand to offer advice and expertise.