You have migrated your business data to the cloud to keep up with the latest technology trends. But, is merely moving your data to the cloud enough to keep your business secure? What comes next? How do you make sure that your critical business data, apps, and your entire IT landscape is secure? This is when cloud security or cloud computing security comes into the picture.
What is cloud computing security? It’s made up of policies, processes, procedures, and digital capabilities to protect your cloud-based systems.
The Importance of Cloud Security
Cybercriminals are innovative and sophisticated, constantly attacking systems with new and powerful security threats. If you think moving to a cloud-based system automatically makes you immune to security threats, that’s far from the truth. Security threats can attack both on-premises and cloud environments. Cloud security is no longer a choice but a necessity for your business, especially as you move forward to enable and support a virtual and remote workforce.
Benefits of Cloud Security
To come up with a proper, result-oriented security strategy, it is important to partner with a cloud security service provider like Solid Systems, who understands your business’ IT architecture and offers customised cloud computing services. While there are several benefits of cloud security, here are some significant ones:
- Centralised Security
An increasing need to protect and safeguard complex IT infrastructure gave birth to centralised cloud security. Traditional on-premises IT ecosystems use decentralised security. This means that the IT team is responsible for ensuring that all end devices, apps, and storage locations are safe from security threats.
In cloud-based ecosystems, for both physical and virtual end devices and apps, businesses can centralise security controls using a unified security system. This approach safeguards the entire company’s IT network and eliminates the need to invest in traditional on-premises hardware, thus saving cost, time, and efforts. - Reduced Costs
As mentioned earlier, one of the key benefits of cloud storage and cloud computing is that businesses need not invest in on-premises hardware or a huge IT team to maintain security manually. Cloud security reduces capital investment, maintenance costs, administrative expenses, and other overheads. It also saves time as the internal IT team, instead of putting off system-related fires every day, can focus on essential tasks. - Enhanced Reliability
Cloud solutions are scalable, agile, and reliable. Cloud users can access data from anywhere, anytime, from any device safely without compromising security. It is vital to choose the right IT partner to ensure that your cloud network is protected against data and security threats, manual errors, corruption, data deletion, and other such perils. - Improved Disaster Recovery
Centralised security in cloud-based networks allows businesses to come up with, design, and implement disaster recovery plans which can be managed from a single point. It provides you with the opportunity to back up your data and restore it quickly and easily should disaster strike.
Traditional disaster recovery requires creating and implementing a remote disaster recovery plan. It means constant maintenance and support from the internal IT team, with high manual intervention.
A disaster recovery plan in cloud computing, on the other hand, will allow you to save your critical data and apps in a central storage server. If a disaster does occur, you have the option to automatically move this critical data to a secondary site. Also, administrators will immediately be alerted, so that they can take all necessary action to prevent data loss, and to stop unauthorised access. - Enhanced Flexibility
As cloud security is available as an on-demand or pay-as-you-go service, it is highly scalable and flexible. This feature means that your company can customise your cloud security or disaster recovery solutions to meet your business goals, irrespective of your business size. Plus, as your company grow, you’ll be able to upgrade your plan with nothing more than the click of a button, and have access to your updated package immediately. - Enhanced Data Security
Apart from offering all features and benefits of traditional on-premises IT security, cloud security provides a wide range of enhanced data security benefits, including data privacy and compliance. In this age of GDPR and the POPI Act, this is essential in ensuring that your business runs smoothly, and maintains a good relationship with your clientele.
You can run a native cloud or a hybrid cloud network to ensure that your cloud solutions meet your business’ unique needs. Plus, since cloud providers always run regular patches, you can rest assured that your data is backed up the data frequently, and that your technology updated at all times. - Prevent Accidental Data Leaks
A data leak is a loss of sensitive or critical business data which is unintentionally exposed either physically or online. It includes the accidental loss, theft, or unauthorised access and distribution of data on business hard drives, laptops, cloud systems, or other storage hardware. When a cybercriminal has easy and unauthorised access to your sensitive business data, it is called a data leak. Cloud computing can easily battle high-level security concerns by issuing alerts in the event of an unusual activity and tracing and treating the threats before they attack the network. Plus, with cloud security, you can maintain control over who should have access to your information, and can manage your users’ login credentials to ensure that they are secure.
Wrapping up
By now, it is clear that there are several security benefits of cloud computing, and numerous advantages of cloud security. It’s much more beneficial than on-premises data security. You can ensure that your cloud security includes comprehensive guidelines and a robust disaster recovery plan that not only meets your business objectives, but is scalable in the future as well. It gives businesses access to high-level data storage and security solutions. It is also highly flexible, and reliable. It enhances security, reduces costs, and prevents cybersecurity threats.
So what’s the next step now that you know you need cloud security? If you are looking for comprehensive and customisable cloud security services, contact Solid Systems right away.
