Benefits of Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing?

In the past, many organizations hosted their data and applications on-prem in server rooms or data centers. Under this model, an organization was wholly responsible for purchasing, installing, configuring, maintaining and securing their infrastructure, even if these types of IT services fell outside their areas of expertise.

Utilizing the cloud, however, enables organizations to take advantage of the expertise and resources of specialists in data center operation and maintenance. Under a cloud model, a cloud provider is responsible for deploying and maintaining the hardware, and potentially some of the software layers of their customers’ infrastructure stacks. At some point, the customer takes over control, maintaining their own operating systems, software, etc. A cloud provider may also offer users access to applications hosted on the cloud such as web-based email or data storage.

Cloud computing is critical nowadays because IT systems are increasingly vital to companies’ operations, and the constraints of an organization’s on-prem infrastructure can impede growth. Cloud computing  enables an organization to achieve greater flexibility, scalability than they could in-house, and also provides other benefits.

Cloud Computing Security

While the cloud may be important for organizations to grow and compete effectively in the marketplace, these environments often differ significantly from the on-prem data centers that organizations are accustomed to.

A common concern for organizations who plan to or have adopted cloud infrastructure is cloud computing security. Companies face a variety of issues when attempting to secure their cloud investment, including:

• Infrastructure Complexity: Many organizations that adopt cloud computing take a multi-cloud approach, enabling them to take advantage of the various benefits and optimizations of different cloud providers. However, this dramatically increases the complexity of maintaining consistent security across an organization’s IT infrastructure as it requires securing many disparate cloud environments.
• Security Misconfigurations: Cloud service providers offer various settings by which a customer can tune its cloud deployment and cloud security. However, these settings vary from one provider to another and can be complex to properly and securely configure, creating the potential for security misconfigurations that place the business at risk.
• Data Loss: Cloud collaboration and data storage solutions are designed to make it easy to share data hosted in the cloud. While this is good for collaboration, it also creates security risks. For example, setting a cloud-based resource to use link sharing makes it accessible to anyone who knows or can guess the URL.
• Lack of Vital Expertise: Securing the cloud requires expertise in both a cloud environment and security. The cybersecurity industry is facing a significant skills shortage, and specialists are even more difficult and expensive to attract and retain. As a result, companies often struggle to find vital talent to secure their cloud deployments, especially when this requires knowledge of multiple different cloud environments.
• Reduced Visibility and Control: Under the shared responsibility model, the cloud provider has complete control over a portion of an organization’s cloud infrastructure stack. This means that an organization lacks access to its underlying infrastructure, which can impede visibility and make it impossible to deploy some types of monitoring and security solutions.
• Solution Integration: With a move to the cloud, an organization expands its IT infrastructure, often to include multi-cloud environments. The need to protect a variety of environments against a range of threats can result in a complex array of security solutions. Integrating these solutions across on-prem and multiple cloud environments can be complicated. 
• Regulatory Compliance: Companies are subject to a range of regulations, and regulatory complexity is growing. Achieving and demonstrating regulatory compliance is complex in the cloud where an organization lacks low-level visibility and control and needs to secure many different cloud environments.
• Shadow IT: Cloud infrastructure is designed to be easy to use, meaning that employees can easily set up and use personal and unauthorized corporate cloud services for their work. Security teams can struggle to secure corporate data and applications hosted on cloud infrastructure created without their knowledge and outside of their direct control.