Perceptions of Cloud Technology Safety Are Shifting to Be More Positive

Perceptions of Cloud Technology Safety Are Shifting to Be More Positive

cloud security and small business
Cybersecurity threat protection is on the minds of many these days. For big companies, data breaches are a costly event. Naturally, companies want to prevent them from happening.  An evaluation of a specific technology isn’t considered complete without looking at the security aspects. And for some industries, for some time, cloud services weren’t seen as being secure enough.  Slowly, this evaluation is shifting. More and more industries and experts are beginning to believe that cloud services are no less secure than on-premises technologies.

Interest In The Cloud Has Spread Wide

According to a study by Nominet, “the vast majority (88%) of respondents to our survey reported that their organization is currently engaged in, or is planning to, adopt cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.” Nominet points out that it’s mainly critical national infrastructure (CNI) organizations lagging behind, with a smaller number of 64%. Nominet’s research includes the feedback from almost 300 CISOs, CTOs, and CIOs—individuals who are directly responsible for supervising cybersecurity practices.

The Cloud Vs On-Premises Services

61% of respondents in Nominet’s study believed that the safety risks inherent to the cloud are the same, or lower, than on-premises tech. However, beliefs varied across different industries. Most notably, respondents from utilities (69%), healthcare (55%), and government (50%) were “much more likely than the average to believe that cloud is a riskier proposition to on-premise.” The more regulated an industry is, the more it tends to be concerned with the safety risks of cloud services. With cloud services, the responsibility of cybersecurity is shared between the cloud provider and the user/tenant. This sharing of responsibility, then, may be off putting for highly regulated businesses.

Why Cloud is Often More Secure for Small Businesses

For small companies, especially, it’s not possible to put the same amount of effort into cybersecurity that a cloud vendor like Amazon AWS does on a daily basis. Put simply, by using cloud services, a large degree of cybersecurity responsibilities are taken out of your hands (and placed into more capable ones).

Moving Forward With Cloud Technologies

Cloud security concerns are nowhere near being a settled issue. To move forward, cloud providers need to educate their users on how misconfigurations can lead to vulnerabilities. At the same time, businesses must understand that, in the end, they are solely responsible for the proper configuration of their cloud services.