Cloud Security : Is it really just is Myth?

By Darshik Jariwala - November, 14th 2013

 

The era we live in today is beginning to be called as the Cloud Computing era despite that fact that it was actually introduced many years ago, the reason being that we are constantly watching it grow each day at an unbelievable pace and starting to realize how it affects not just the companies thriving on the cloud business but also how it reached across to almost every person using the Internet.

Contrary to what many might believe today, cloud computing is infact still not adopted as readily today. One of the main reasons being Security, and understandably so. The RSA Conference held in San Francisco this year saw the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) introducing the top 9 threats to Cloud Computing in 2013 named “The Notorious Nine”, which had Data Breaches as number One on the list.

A survey conducted by IDG Enterprise for Cloud Research 2013 shows that 49 percent of executive-level managers are still skeptical to move on to the cloud due to various reasons, the top 3 reasons being Security, Losing Control and Data Protection. Concerns regarding Cloud Security are not surprising considering the security breaches that has affected many mid and large scale companies. However, according to David Hunter , CTO of Platform Security for VMware, “a deeper look yields a great irony: a mature cloud architecture is actually more, not less, secure than traditional IT environments”. He further argues saying one should understand that the Cloud technology is now driving by Virtualization which provides “increased visibility and control of IT resources” and focuses on applications, data and users; and not the physical machines. He explains that the same approach can be applied for cloud security. Virtualization technology helps make the cloud environment more secure than the traditional IT environment.

Gartner has predicted that the Cloud security services will grow tremendously and will be worth $3.1 billion in 2015. Speaking more about Cloud Security and emphasizing more on Encryption, Ruggero Contu, Research Director at Gartner says, “The cloud-based security market remains a viable one, offering providers many opportunities for expansion,” further explaining,”Encryption will be a new area of growth, but it remains a complex activity.The strongest interest will be in encryption products from cloud security brokers, which are relatively easy to deploy and have options for on-premises encryption management.” Security-as-a-Service is also set to increase as an organization gains more experience with SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and recent trends such as BYOD which are also steadily gaining momentum.

The question is no more about whether or not the organizations in future will adopt cloud computing, it is only a matter of who adopts it first. The data stored over the cloud is growing exponentially and is bound to increase by at-least 50 percent in the next few years, if the present scenarios anything to go by. More users and companies will be adopting it each passing day and the ones who don’t go with the flow will simply be left behind. And joining the bandwagon after that would be as good as fighting a lost battle.

Photo Credit – Kevlangdo/Wikimedia Commons