Cloud Adoption Continues with Focus on Security, Report Reveals

While security still remains a concern for enterprises, professionals are no longer letting it get in the way. Businesses today are faced with increasing pressure to employ state-of-the-art solutions while still staying within budgetary restraints, making the cloud an ideal option. Due to its many benefits, professionals are moving past their unfounded fears and making the move toward the cloud.

Security Threats

A recently released report, the Alert Logic Cloud Security Report, showed how widespread cloud adoption has become. The report also highlighted the security threats enterprises face today, both for cloud-hosted data and on-premise solutions. The same attacks that once targeted on-premise solutions are now moving to cloud-hosted solutions, making it more important than ever that cloud providers employ strict security standards on all hosted data.

Providers should pay particular attention to malware and botnet attacks, which are the most common in on-premise environments. Those types of attacks are now on the rise in cloud environments, as are brute force attacks, which rose from 30 to 44 percent of customers during the survey period. Vulnerability scans increased from 27 percent to 44 percent, as well.

The Honeypots

The report highlighted a few “honeypots” that should be of particular concern to cloud hosting providers. Europe has the largest number of attacks overall, with attacks exceeding the U.S. fourfold. The majority of attacks around the world were on Microsoft-DS (port 445), which supports Windows file-sharing, as well as NetBIOS-less traffic usually seen with small and medium businesses.

Although 14 percent of the malware collected through the study wasn’t detectable by 51 percent of the leading antiviral solutions, strong antimalware protection with updated definitions is essential. Cloud providers must be diligent in ensuring their software solutions are the latest and greatest to better serve its clients. Through reports like the Alert Logic Cloud Security Report, cloud hosting services can remain aware of the ongoing threats in order to ensure each danger is being appropriately addressed.

(Writing by Kirill Bensonoff; Editing by Amy Canter, Todd Aitken, and Megan Batchelor)  Kirill Bensonoff  is Principal at ComputerSupport.com. He is responsible for delivering technology solutions, driving customer satisfaction, maintaining the culture of innovation as well as overseeing the strategic direction of the company and building business relationships.

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