How Secure Is the Cloud?

We all remember The Fappening, the iCloud hack from 2014 where nude pictures of celebrities were leaked over the internet. While it has started serious conversations over privacy rights and other laws relating to the internet, it has also led some to question how secure the cloud really is.

The major benefits of cloud-based security include ease of deployment and maintenance, performance, and ability to scale. Perimeter protection for on-premise IT and the cloud are very similar. Often, however, security issues arise due to human error and employees who accidentally click on a link from an email with Cryptolocker or fail to keep their software updated. Moving data to the cloud reduces the likelihood of employees harming data in this way. 

Wieland Alge, VP and GM of EMEAR at Barracuda Networks stated, “Almost all of the massive data breaches we’ve seen as of late were within traditional on-premise IT. Sometimes we are too quick in stating that the cloud is an inherently insecure element.”

Albert Logic investigated cloud security and how it measures up to on-premise security. It completed a survey pulled from 2,200 customers and 232,364 verified security incidents in both cloud and on-premise systems and found that brute force attacks occurred as frequently in the cloud as in on-premise IT systems. On the other hand, 56% of on-premise systems had malware attacks, whereas only 11% of cloud systems were attacked. Likely, we'll begin to think differently about cloud security as more and more companies deploy public cloud systems.