In Cloud Security We Trust

Clement
Goh, Managing Director at Equinix South Asia

Security
is always of special concern to current cloud users and would-be adopters. The
consequences of a breach are just too devastating to take a “wait and see”
approach. When respondents to the RightScale 2016 State
of the Cloud Report listed their top cloud challenges, 29%
named security, making it the second-most cited concern. According to a 2016
study by Ponemon Institute, this comes as no surprise as the average
consolidated total cost of a
data breach would be USD$4 million, or USD$158 per lost or
stolen record.[1]
That’s not even including the non-tangible damage to a company’s reputation and
customer confidence.

With
the expected continued proliferation of the cloud and interrelated technologies
in 2017, the security challenges of enterprises will be greater than ever
before. There’s never been a better time for companies to have sound digital
security strategies in place. This is especially so when you consider the new
ways enterprises were attacked in 2016.

In
a new spin on a classic distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the
attackers used “an army of hijacked security cameras and video recorders” to
flood their US-based targets with so much network traffic that it knocked them
offline. As many as a million security cameras, video recorders and other
infected devices were used in the assault – prompting fresh concerns about the
vulnerability of millions of devices in both businesses and homes connected to
the Internet.

Cloud is more secure now than ever – and will only be
better

Perhaps
as a response, enterprises are beginning to embrace cloud services more than
ever because of the advancements in cloud security – amongst other benefits
such as increased reliability and scalability. A survey conducted by Clutch last
year found that 64% of enterprises consider cloud infrastructure a “more
secure” alternative to legacy systems, and 22% perceive security as a top
benefit of the cloud. 

With
cloud services, a significant burden of security updates is taken off
enterprises. Enterprises often fall behind on such updates and this opens up
major security holes. Furthermore, most cloud services are audited on a yearly
basis – more often than most on-premises infrastructure deployments.
Cloud-based security also offers 24-hour monitoring, speed of implementation,
ease of maintenance, and economies of scale that increase the scope and
effectiveness of security programs at lower cost. In fact, cloud-based security
services are offered for specialized attacks such as DDoS.

In
the same survey, 5% of enterprise respondents implemented security measures
beyond those provided by the cloud vendor with more than half of the
respondents spending up to USD$500,000 annually on these additional measures.

One
example of such additional measures would be the establishment of new, direct
interconnection strategy between enterprises and cloud service providers
because no connection is as safe as a private connection. Interconnection is the ability to connect in many ways to the many
partners, customers, employees and geographies to accelerate business
performance. Having a physical presence in a vendor-neutral data center of a
multi-national data center provider enables enterprises to privately and
directly connect to other key IT stakeholders on a local, regional or global
level.

In
addition to reducing the “cyber-attack surface”, private and direct connections
also eliminate the risks of backhauling cloud traffic to remote data centers
via the Internet or over multiple “hops” in a long-haul network. Enterprises
can also deliver security services locally, closer to users, data and clouds.
Data residency and compliance can be maintained by interconnecting cloud-based
services, such as real-time analytics, next to local data – keeping it where it
was created.[2]

It’s no longer a ‘cloudy’
road ahead