At my panel at the America’s Growth Capital Partners Conference today a threshold question was is their a difference between cloud security and on premises security. The answer was almost a unanimous yes. But that was more based on gut feelings and small scale observations. We now have a definitive answer to the question though. Alert Logic‘s State of Cloud Security Report has answered the question once and for all. We have qualitative proof of the difference in the frequency and types of attacks we see in the different type of environments.
Examining over 2B security incidents across a variety of environments a picture emerges that we see very different kinds of attacks in the cloud than what we see on premises. You can download the report for free (and I strongly urge you too) to get all of the details yourself. Alert Logic looked at both the frequency and type of occurrences. There is plainly a difference between what we see on premises versus what we see in the in security on premises versus security in the cloud.
Alert Logic with over 1500 customers and many hosting/cloud providers was a in a great position to pull all of this data together from across their data collection activities. Analyzing this data to find the trends that matter was a terrific piece of work by the Alert Logic security research team.
Now this does not mean that the cloud is safer than on premises per say, but it does give you pause to think. I think after looking at the data and analysis, it is hard to say that on premises is safer than the cloud though too. So those who seem hesitant to move to the cloud due to security concerns should take a close look here and maybe consider about rethinking that assumption.
It also makes a good case for what we need to protect against in terms of cloud based attacks. Clearly web application security was a key driver in the kinds of attacks we see in the cloud. I am sure that observation played heavily into Alert Logic’s decision to acquire the ArmorLogic and its WAF technology.
Alert Logic is planning to publish and update to the report twice a year. The State of Cloud Security Report should provide some great insight for anyone interested in the kinds of incidents and reports we see in the cloud.
Related articles
- Five Cloud Predictions for 2012 (zdnet.com)
- What The WAF? Alert Logic Acquires ArmorLogic (ashimmy.com)
- The Inevitability of Security-as-a-Service (securecloudreview.com)
- Alert Logic Acquires ArmorLogic and Their WAF Technology (securecloudreview.com)
