Business trends 2022: Public cloud will be your security superpower
With cyber threats on the rise, it could feel like the wrong time to migrate to public cloud - but it could actually be your superpower. Read more and find out why our experts believe public cloud can benefit your security.
Key Takeaways
- Many IT leaders hesitate to migrate to public cloud due to security concerns, yet experts suggest it can actually enhance security - when implemented correctly.
- Major public cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon handle continuous security updates, delivering protections most organisations can’t match in-house.
- Global brands such as Netflix and Coca-Cola rely on public cloud, demonstrating confidence in its security and resilience at scale.
Is it really the wrong time to migrate?
With cyber threats continuing to rise, it could feel like the wrong time to move your business-critical applications to public cloud. You are not alone.
According to the ADAPT CIO Edge Report (Feb 2020), over one-third of Australian IT leaders believe that security concerns are the number one reason they have not migrated to public cloud. We believe public cloud can be your security superpower and that’s why it’s one of our Business Trend 2022 topics.
To explain it in more detail, we spoke to Public Cloud Architect at Interactive, Anthony Edwards.
Expert insights:
Anthony Edwards
Public Cloud Architect at Interactive
That statistic around public cloud being a safety concern really surprises me and I would assume people feel that way because it’s so easy to create applications in the public cloud. It’s simple to get started on AWS or Azure and when you sign up you are given a full administrator user by default, and you have full control. You can get your application set up without any real restrictions. I assume people think if it’s that easy, it can’t be secure.
From a platform point of view, there are security benefits right off the bat when you go into public cloud. Microsoft and Amazon are responsible for automatically patching servers behind the scenes and making sure that critical security updates are done. They also ensure that their edge layer is protected so they automatically provide denial of service protection for you. You’ve got to think about the scale of these companies.
They have huge backbones that can take a lot of the traffic which means you’re protected from someone who wants to come in and immediately give you a DDoS attack.
Another brilliant benefit is the reporting. You get security reports automatically from AWS and Azure. A report may say, ‘did you know that your server may be vulnerable because you’ve got this port open to the world? Here’s a one-click button that you can press to automatically resolve that’. That’s one example that’s particularly powerful, but the reporting is quite robust.
Whether it’s Azure Sentinel or AWS Firewall, all the rules that they have are constantly being updated going through different machine learning models to find out what are the new threats. All you need to do to enable Azure Sentinel or AWS Firewall is one click of a button and you’ve got it across your entire public cloud environment.
The final thing to look at is the profile of companies that use public cloud. Netflix, Spotify, Coca-Cola, PayPal, Dropbox, neo banks, stockbrokers and many others all trust public cloud. The amount of data and scale those companies require is enormous and if they are confident in doing that on public cloud it’s a great use case for other companies to make the move.
