Cloud computing has more to offer than ever before to companies and individuals. Cloud security, as well as security as a service (SECaaS), is an area of cloud computing that is becoming more attentive, because of its potential to deliver tremendous benefits to businesses. Economical, scalable, expedient, omnipresent, and on-demand access to shared resources is some of the cloud features that have shifted business processes to the cloud.
In this post, we discuss eight security benefits of cloud computing that improve the security and resilience of your business.
1. Benefits of scale
When implemented on a larger scale, all kinds of security measures in the cloud are cheaper. You can buy better protection in the cloud with the same amount of investment in security. This includes all defensive measures such as filtering, patch management, hardening of virtual machine instances and hypervisors, human resources and their management and vetting, hardware and software redundancy, secure authentication, efficient role-based access control, and federated identity management solutions by default.
Other benefits of scale include:
Multiple locations: Most cloud providers are able to replicate content in various locations by default. This increases redundancy and independence from failure and provides out-of-the-box disaster recovery.
Edge networks: Storage, processing, and delivery closer to the edge of the network means overall service reliability and quality are increased, and global side effects on local network problems are less likely.
Improved timeliness of response to incidents: Early detection of new malware deployments can develop more effective and efficient response capabilities.
Threat management: Cloud providers can also hire specialists to deal with specific security threats, while only a few generalists can afford smaller companies.
2. Security is a market differentiator
For many cloud customers, security is a priority. Customers will buy more than in traditional environments, based on their reputations for confidentiality, integrity, and resilience, and the safety services of their providers. This remains a strong incentive to enhance security practices and compete in safety for cloud providers.
3. Security updates and defaults
In the cloud, the customers can pre-harden and upgrade virtual machine images and software modules, as per the most advanced patches and security updates. Updates can be implemented over a homogeneous platform many times faster than in traditional patch models. Applications in PaaS and SaaS models will be hardened to run outside the corporate environment, making them more portable and robust than the equivalent corporate software. They are also frequently updated and centrally patched to minimize vulnerability.
4. Scaling of resources
Cloud resources like storage, CPU time, memory, web service requests and virtual machine instances, and the level of granular resource consumption control can be rapidly scaled on-demand, while the level of granular resource consumption control increases as technologies mature. A cloud provider may dynamically allocate filtering, trend shaping, encryption, etc. to enhance support for defensive measures (against DDoS attacks) if an attack is likely or occurs.
In combination with appropriate resource optimization, dynamic resource relocation may limit the effects of some attacks and limit the impact of increasing security defense resource use in order to combat such attacks. The ability to dynamically scale defensive resources on-demand has clear resilience advantages. The granular scaling of individual resources is cheaper than scaling all system resources, especially as a response to sudden (non-malicious) demand peaks.
5. Standardized interfaces
Large cloud providers can offer a standardized, open security interface (MSS) to service providers to their clients. This could lead to an opener and more readily available security market where customers can easily switch providers with lower installation costs.
6. Security audit
IaaS supports virtual machine cloning on-demand. In the case of a suspected security breach, the customer can take an image of a live virtual machine or its virtual components for offline forensic analysis, resulting in less downtime for analysis. With tap storage, multiple clones can be created and analyzing activities parallel to reduce investigation time. This improves expert security incident analysis and increases the likelihood of tracking attackers and patching weaknesses. However, it assumes the customer has access to trained forensic experts (which is not a standard writing cloud service).
It can also provide cost-effective log storage, allowing more comprehensive logging without compromising performance. Pay as you go cloud storage brings transparency to your storage costs and makes the adjustment easier for future audit log requirements. This makes the process of identifying security incidents more efficient.
7. Better risk management
The need to quantify penalties for various SLA risk scenarios and the potential impact of security breaches on reputation motivates more rigorous internal audit and risk assessment procedures. Frequent audits imposed on CPs tend to expose risks and can have the same positive effect.
8. Resource concentration
Although resource concentration has undoubtedly security disadvantages, it has the clear advantage of cheaper physical parameterization and unit access control, and of more accessible and more affordable application of comprehensive data management, patch management, incident management, and maintenance policies.
