The Overlapping Realities Of Cyber Security And Cloud Computing

In the last few years, digital transformation has made significant disruptions in the IT industry. One of the most dominant and discussed topics amongst IT professionals in this digital era is Cloud Computing. With the worldwide cloud market revenue expected to hit $214.3 Billion in 2019, the amount of cloud implementations has seen an upward trend in the last few years. According to an analyst from Gartner, the cloud stands at the second position in Gartner's annual CIO survey of key technology investments.

While the adoption of cloud computing has been on the rise, on the other hand, protecting the businesses from fraudulent cyber-attacks has become an even more serious challenge for businesses. Statistics show that in the last five years, the number of security breaches has increased by about 67% and about 43% of SMBs are the ones affected by cyber-attacks. The other buzz word that has been grabbing the attention is cybersecurity. Cybersecurity helps businesses to protect their systems and networks from fraudulent attacks. According to the statistics from Global Market Insights, Inc., the value of the cybersecurity market is anticipated to reach $300 billion by 2024.

Keeping your business data safe and available

Every business owner wants their data to be safe. Any data theft/loss can result in a substantial impact on the business and the trust value for the customers. Since the number of connected devices is expected to grow over 20 billion by 2020 according to the prediction by Gartner, it becomes very important for the organization to maintain cybersecurity to stay afloat in the competition. Cybersecurity not only relates to providing secure access to business applications and data and safeguard from threats but also about making sure the data is readily available when needed. Therefore, how is it possible for organizations to keep the data safe and at the same time easily accessible?

This is where the combination of cloud computing and cybersecurity plays a key role. At first glance, both may seem like different concepts and independent of each other. But, in reality, they are similar to the opposite poles of a magnet that attract each other. As the number of cloud implementations increase and businesses start moving their workloads to the cloud, cybersecurity automatically becomes a part of the process to secure the data and make it easily accessible.

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Cyber Security and Cloud Computing – the powerful combo

This brings an all-together whole new dimension of the two concepts known as “Cloud Security”. The cloud technology is more of a business strategy to help organizations realize savings while security automatically becomes a necessity to keep the data safe and easily accessible. As most of the organizations make the switch to the cloud, they have to implement security as a part of their business strategy. With the cloud computing market expected to hit $116 billion by 2021, statistics also have to show some terrifying numbers when it comes to cybersecurity. According to 2019 ACR from Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime damages is anticipated to cost businesses almost $6 trillion annually by 2021 (an increase from $3 trillion in 2015). The average cost of cybercrime is also estimated to be $13 million per year. (Source: HashedOut).

From the different cloud models such as public, private, hybrid cloud, organizations prefer the hybrid cloud model as they can store non-critical data on the public cloud and sensitive data on the private cloud. As Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says, “In the end, because of all the technology, all the capability, you’re going to be more secure, not less secure.”

When it comes to cloud vendors, they are known to adopt better security than enterprise data centers. But, it’s not that easy to just take the data and store it up on the cloud. The company security teams must certify the right vendors before moving the data. Automating the whole process of migrating the workloads from data center to the cloud without performing any security analysis is one of the major reasons for data hacks and cyber-attacks.

With cybersecurity and cloud computing going hand-in-hand, it will become easier for organizations to combat cyber-attacks and ensure the safety of data. The cloud technology can take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) techniques to identify and quickly address any security flaws,  ensure the safety of the data and a strong infrastructure.

Importance of Cloud Security

Making the transition to the cloud requires strong cloud security in place. Moving to the cloud helps organizations to reduce the costs and stay in the competition. It’s important to pick the right cloud provider that offers the best cloud security suitable for your business. Cloud security defines the set of policies and security measures that protect the business data and the infrastructure. The cloud providers can deliver security that can be customized according to the business needs.

Cloud security helps organizations to provide a secure infrastructure for the users to access the data. The data can be accessed from anywhere. It offers all the functionality needed to secure the IT infrastructure while helping the organizations to reap the benefits of cloud computing without compromising on data security and compliance. Investing in cloud security with a well-known cloud service provider helps security administrators to manage everything from a single place within the organization.

Use Cases:

Let’s take a look at some classic use cases where cloud security is in place and how the organizations benefit from this implementation.

1.  Amazon AWS hosting the Department of Defense information

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has its critical data hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS environment helps DoD to maintain a secure environment to store mission-critical data. As a part of the operating procedure, AWS completed the DoD Cloud computing security requirements to be able to securely store the government data.

2.  Microsoft Azure

Microsoft’s cloud offering Azure is well known to host the business data of most of the Fortune 500 companies. It’s no doubt that companies of this size wouldn’t be concerned about the security of their data. Azure delivers security to the expectation levels of these customers that sets the benchmark for the success of their business.

While security attacks are known to happen even to the best companies in business with all security measures in place, it’s evident that outsourcing the cybersecurity to an experienced cloud service provider with proven experience shall ensure the protection of their data and operations. Most of the modern-day cloud providers offer to alert and monitoring solutions that can help the business stay away from cyber-attacks and minimize the damage caused due to security breaches.

Wrapping Up

Cloud computing is the game-changer in the IT industry and is expected to make clear inroads in the future. There is no doubt that cybersecurity, on the other hand, has a major role to play when it comes to business data and infrastructure. As the number of cloud installations increases, they together make a deadly combination to set up a reliable infrastructure. Organizations have to stay on top of their priority for cloud security right from the time of making an informed decision of choosing their cloud vendor.

Keen to upskill yourself in cloud computing? Check out Manipal’s Post Graduate Certificate Program in Cloud Computing. Also, dive deep into the cybersecurity domain with the Master Certificate in Cyber Security (Red Team) course which ensures you a flourishing cybersecurity career.

Written By

Kamal Jacob