In the past few years, there has been a mass migration of businesses to the cloud, and for good reason. Cloud computing, phone systems, storage, and cloud backup can help businesses save money, work more efficiently, and stay protected in the event of an IT disaster.
Security with the Digital Cloud
Operating over the cloud makes IT systems inherently more secure. It moves computing and data storage to a central location that can be more easily protected.
The greatest risk of danger from running operations on the cloud comes from the misconfiguration of your systems as you migrate from on-premise systems to the cloud. These misconfigurations could lead to new vulnerabilities that allow unwanted intruders access to confidential information and enterprise software.
Benefits of the Cloud
By managing your data, applications, and systems on the cloud, you can access all the information you need across internet-connected devices in any location. This allows businesses to reduce a number of expenses including office space, business travel, IT personnel, and on-premise IT infrastructure. Because your information will be stored across multiple data centers your cloud security services can offer disaster recovery. This minimizes the likelihood that your business would permanently lose data.
Let’s take a closer look at how moving your operations and product and service development to the cloud can help protect your business from cybersecurity threats.
Why Cloud Services Improve Cyber Security for Your Business
Why pay for expensive on-premise servers, racks, and additional network security software? The leading cloud service providers have security centers to keep your data protected and operations running smoothly. Here’s how.
- Controlling Access to Data Centers – By being physically removed from employees, vendors, and visitors, data centers offer an added layer of protection to your company’s sensitive data. Cloud services benefit security with stricter access control that may include multiple levels of clearance. If your employees have easy access to sensitive data, so will hackers if their accounts are ever compromised due to phishing or malware.
- Leading with Cyber Security Expertise – In addition to securing the physical assets of your cloud infrastructure, cloud service providers also have experienced security personnel available. These IT professionals will manage the hardware and software where your data is being computed or stored.
Their cloud security services represent a cost-effective approach because they use leveraged economies of scale. This means your cost of storage and computing, as well as maintenance, remains very low. To stay competitive, these cloud service providers constantly replace their inventory and release patches once bugs are identified. This makes it very difficult for hackers to develop zero-day attacks and find vulnerabilities in high-end software systems. - Ongoing Maintenance of Systems – An alternative option for managing a team of in-house IT professionals is to leverage the security services of cloud providers. By using a multi-cloud approach, your team can develop a competitive advantage that delivers greater application speed, minimal downtime, and higher security. By running on the latest storage and computing hardware, and updating firmware and software, your chances of being attacked are greatly diminished.
Hackers would rather focus their efforts on infiltrating a client’s system where IT infrastructure has been misconfigured and is running outdated software and operating systems. - Incorporating Redundancy Into Cloud Deployments – Redundancy in cloud security services allows your business to store multiple copies of each set of data in different locations. This is an effective security precaution in the case of data loss caused by an unexpected cyber attack. If a hacker can gain access to one set of data, you can be assured that you can back up your systems from the other data sources. NIC’s remediation planning services allow your company to take preventative measures to ensure operations continue as usual after a network breach, or when data loss occurs.
Your cloud service provider offers security in many ways to protect your network. If, however, you plan to run applications on the cloud, you must ensure those applications are free of software bugs. Partnering with NIC ensures that your business is secure from threats that extend beyond the cloud itself. This means all of your applications and software which are running on the cloud are managed to reduce the risk of any malicious activity.
Scaling Your Security
Depending on how you want to manage your cloud deployment, you need the right level of security. The more you manage the network infrastructure, the greater the security measures you should have in place.
If you are running a financial firm and are investing in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model to have greater control of customer data, you must run cloud security services that separate sensitive data. If however, you are running a business in an industry with more relaxed regulations and less stringent compliance measures, it may make sense to outsource some of those duties by running a software-as-a-service model.
Partner with NIC
By working with NIC, you can run vulnerability scans that can check if your systems are secure on the cloud. NIC’s cybersecurity services help prevent, detect, and remediate cybersecurity threats from running cloud services. Schedule a free consultation to learn how to boost your security position on the cloud with NIC.
Contact us today by email at info@nicitpartner.com, or by phone at 1-877-721-3330.
