Introduction
The remote work and work-from-home trend brought on by the recent pandemic have pushed companies towards rapid cloud adoption. Recent statistics suggest that nearly 35% of companies are now running more than 50% of their workloads on Azure, AWS and GCP. However, despite the steep rates of adoption, companies are continuing to struggle with effectively managing the complexity of their cloud infrastructures across multiple cloud platforms as well as protecting them from a range of threats. Businesses also need to contend with the significant talent and knowledge paucity in cyber-skills. Recent reports have also pointed out that cloud security incidents were up by a significant margin of 10% from the previous year. 27% of the companies surveyed in the report pointed to misconfiguration as the primary cause for the security incidents. In such a scenario, it makes sense for businesses to focus on cloud security solutions that are suitable for their infrastructure. For more information on implementing cloud security solutions for local businesses, please refer to Managed Cloud Services Joplin.
What is Cloud Security?
Most companies now host almost the entirety of their infrastructure, applications, websites and data on the cloud. With cyber-attacks on the rise, many companies are concerned about cloud security. Cloud service providers need to effectively secure these assets to enable business continuity and quick recovery even in the case of disruptions. Cloud security enables clients with several levels of security controls within the network infrastructure. Security controls refer to all the control-based safeguards and technology protection built into the cloud infrastructure to protect client data from leaks, theft, or loss. In order to leverage cloud security in the right way, businesses need to find the right balance between DDoS protection, high availability, data security, and regulatory compliance as provided by their cloud service provider. These criteria apply regardless of whether the company is using a public cloud or a private cloud. The security controls are typically implemented using applications that work in the cloud on the basis of a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
Top 5 Benefits of Cloud Computing Security
Cloud DDoS Protection
Distributed denial of service attacks target organizations to overwhelm their servers with false requests. As a result of the attack, genuine traffic can’t access the servers of the impacted organization often resulting in server crashes and website downtimes. Needless to say, this kind of an attack has an immediate impact on the quality of service customers expect from the targeted organization and could result in significant loss of sales, business opportunities, revenue, customer trust and brand authority. This type of attack has been used to particularly target retail and gaming websites in the recent past. Amplification attacks are a subset of DDoS attacks that leverages a network of compromised systems to flood target servers with enormous amounts of fake traffic. This kind of attack has been on the rise as well.
Access to Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
DDoS attacks have the ability to overwhelm most traditional network infrastructure (including backup servers) as they can flood target servers with anywhere between 1Gbps to over 20Gbps of traffic. One way for companies to defend themselves against DDoS attacks could be through making use of Content Delivery Networks or CDNs. CDNs make use of a global network of PoPs that enable them to even out huge spikes in traffic. This holds true irrespective of whether the traffic is genuine or not. This feature enables CDNs to get rid of or at least minimize downtimes for companies along with providing them with a host of better security controls. CDNs can help businesses significantly improve the delivery of website content and enhance application functionality the world over. CDNs have the capability to absorb DDoS attacks to ensure continuity of business and services. They enable companies with a lot of flexibility that allows for a range of defensive tactics against DDoS attacks. If your company does not have access to CDN solutions in-house, it might be a good idea to reach out to managed hosting providers like IT Support Joplin that excel in providing enterprises with the right CDN solutions.
Ensuring a high degree of availability
Ensuring high availability of cloud systems means that companies gain the ability to keep their services and infrastructure running even in cases where they experience significant equipment malfunction or failure. Cloud security comes bundled with several critical features such as geo-redundancy, failover protocols, and more to ensure that all enterprise cloud-based data and applications remain secure and available 24*7*365. This is critical as web assets such as business applications or websites need to be continually available to customers. This is why companies should ideally invest in a cloud security solution that is capable of offering real-time support, live monitoring, and more.
Data Security
With the rising number of data breaches, companies are currently focusing their efforts on shoring up their defenses. Many companies are making major investments in tools to deal with different facets of security including access control, intrusion prevention, identity management, virus and malware protection and more. They are also focusing on cybersecurity protocols that secure lines of communications between users and company servers. Here again, companies can make use of CDNs to make use of additional security protocols implemented within their network. The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protects information end-to-end from user to company server and back without allowing third-parties to interfere with the communication or eavesdropping on it. For companies in regulated industries such as ecommerce, it makes sense to opt for CDNs that have PCI compliance and other digital rights management layers.
Regulatory Compliance
Highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare always consider data security and privacy as a top priority. However, with data regulatory frameworks tightening all over the world, data privacy and security has become a top agenda for businesses and consumers alike. The best cloud security solutions can help businesses manage compliance requirements effectively and secure the infrastructure to meet and exceed compliance parameters.
For more information on cloud security, please contact Managed IT services Joplin.