Cloud vs on-premise: striking a balance on security

The popularity of cloud platforms has soared over recent years, as businesses everywhere take advantage of the increased flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and apparent data security they offer. According to a recent report, three in five security professionals believe the risk of a security breach is the same or lower in cloud environments than compared to on-premise. 

Despite this, however, the cloud may not actually be as secure as people believe. Both cloud and on-premise environments can have equally devastating flaws. Opportunistic criminals are all too aware that many business strategies now tend to favour a shift to the cloud, especially within those organisations – such as large enterprises and government bodies – that they would consider to be high-value targets.

As a result, cloud platforms are being aggressively targeted, and have become key strategic features on the global cyber and information warfare battlefield. The truth is that, although it offers a number of – very real – benefits, the cloud is no safer than on-premise infrastructure, and made less so in migrations that don’t prioritise cyber security. 

Data is, of course, the lifeblood of any business. The intelligence and insight it provides is what gives an organisation its competitive edge. Any conversation around security risks will therefore come down to the protection and control of an organisation’s data, whether on-premise or in the cloud. 

So, it’s hardly surprising that, in a desire to retain control over their data, most large businesses simply won’t move it into the cloud. Doing so means they’ll lose visibility of it, which they consider to be a significant business risk. Indeed, apart from the cloud service providers themselves, there are very few £250m+ companies that use the cloud exclusively. Instead, in order to maintain visibility of their data, most organisations operate a hybrid model; part on-premise, and part – mostly public-facing infrastructure – in the cloud. 

Ultimately, a judgment must be made, based on the sensitivity of certain data, as to whether hosting that data in the cloud represents less of a security or business risk than hosting it on-premise. But data isn’t only valuable to an organisation’s business operations; it’s critical to its security posture too. Why, then, would an organisation give this data away to a tech giant? 

Valuable data is being given away to companies that make their moneyfromdata. Doing so effectively enables cloud providers to map out all of the securities and insecurities within that organisation’s network. There’s a reason the cost of cloud is so low; hosting companies are getting far more than just CPU cycles, power, and energy. Fundamentally, to any business, dataisvalue – it has to be protected, and visibility is key to this. After all, once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

Corporate networks are becoming increasingly complicated, containing elements of both cloud and on-premise infrastructure.