What Is Cloud Security? — Types, Solutions, Risks, Benefits Explained!

Alexjohnsonuk
8 min readAug 17, 2022

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What is Cloud Security? — Types, Solutions, Risks, Benefits Explained!

Blog Article

“What is Cloud Security?” — The most trending question in 2022! Let’s find out why?

Bank lockers are for jewelry and original documents; similarly, Cloud Security is for database and code stacks.

How crushed do we feel on realizing that we lost all the contacts and photographs from memory in the phone format? Don’t you regret not syncing your data to the cloud? Well, yes, you do! If mere pictures hold so much importance, you can only imagine the pain of losing all the vital information of an application.

Two reasons that cloud security solutions became a popular demand are the increased flexibility and reduced costs have made cloud security a viable option for businesses worldwide. Besides, who doesn’t want the data to be safe?

Adding more to it, A survey was conducted to gauge how many businesses were actually concerned about developing cloud applications and the security of the same.

The flowchart below is the representation of the survey results found from (ISC)², non-profit membership association for cloud computing security.

What is Cloud Security? — An Overview

Cloud security (also known as cloud computing security) is a subset of cyber security which secures the entire business and its resources. It is probably the best method to accomplish digital agility across your enterprise.

An application during and post-development is exposed to the borderless paradigm of dangers.

Cloud computing security handles the synced hardware and software resources remotely. Handling here implies:

  • Accessing
  • Configuring
  • Manipulating

It offers 100% platform independence. This means the software does not have to be downloaded on the device. It is probably safe to say that cloud computing makes business apps collaborative and movable.

To understand what is cloud computing in cyber security in more depth, here’s a detailed guide that covers cloud security alliances, providers, categories, models, and much more.

Today, developers also believe in the benefits of the latest cloud environments over traditional hosting infrastructures. Wanna know why? Because the latest cloud data security providers safeguard the data from the self-evolving malware and data breaches.

Multiple factors have to be considered before choosing a cloud computing provider, viz. company’s size, cost-effectiveness, priorities, etc.

After the concept of cloud security explained, we have a few sub-concepts connected to cloud security. Check them out below:

A. What is Cloud Native Security Concept?

Cloud native technologies are built and designed to work in an inter-connected and online retail world. On similar lines, cloud-native security is used in securing platforms and infrastructure both.

This is a pretty modern plus practical approach to deploy and secure applications. The entire focus is on cloud-first infrastructure.

Cloud native security is a modern, pragmatic approach applied to secure and deploy applications at scale, emphasizing cloud-first infrastructure. It includes concepts like zero trust and defense-in-depth.

  • It is based on the concept of the Zero-trust Model. Never trust, always verify! — This implies that the cloud’s security parameters treat every old/new user, configured/unconfigured device, and incoming data flow as untrusted. Every time someone tries to enter the cloud, he/she/it has to go through all the security tests.
  • Another base of cloud native security solutions is the Defense-in-Depth Mechanism. This means multiple layers of defensive mechanisms placed in a sequence together.

B. What is Cloud App Security Concept?

Cloud application security concept is pretty simple! Let’s deep dive into the same.

After completing the cloud application development process, the app is synced with a cloud environment instead of a local server. Now, securing the same is termed as a cloud app security concept. The cloud app security portal in the cloud security network plays an important role in securing the application overall.

C. Use Cases of Cloud Network Security

Do you want to find out where all cloud security is useful? Well, today, organizations of every sort, size, and domain are using the cloud for these possible use cases:

  • For data backup
  • Sudden disaster recovery
  • Mailbox syncing
  • Virtual desktops
  • Software development and testing
  • Big data analytics (large volume)
  • Customer-facing web applications

D. Example of Cloud Security

Here are a few domain-wise cloud security examples

Example 1 — Cloud computing in the healthcare industry has helped in personalized treatments for patients. Practices have patient data stored on a cloud, allowing them to craft different treatment combinations to heal the ailments.

Example 2 — FinTech, another marvel of finance and technology combined, helps in real-time money tracking. This, in turn, makes fraud detection an easier job.

Example 3 — The gaming industry is using cloud environments to deliver online games to players all around the globe.

What are the Advantages of Cloud Security?

Food items with short shelter life become stale and are not fit to consume after a couple of days. Similarly, traditional security infrastructures cannot keep up with higher productivity and compliances.

Read and decide which of the following are advantages of cloud computing security that can bring revolutionary changes into your workflow:

  • Peep Into Your System 24×7!

Foremost cloud security benefits include the latest cloud solutions that enable you to peep into your systems literally all the time! First, this lets you escape the risk of losing data. Second, you can monitor your risk posture in real-time.

  • Effective Protection OR Savior From DDoS Attacks

DDoS, i.e., Distributed Denial of Service attacks, has grown in all — numbers, magnitude, severity, and sophistication. But, the advanced cloud security solutions can save you from DDoS attacks, which would otherwise lead to data loss.

  • Pay As You Go (PAYG)

Additionally, the benefits of cloud security include the cloud computing service providers that follow a PAYG model. You pay only for the part of the cloud environment you consume.

  • Unimaginable Scalability!

Here’s a hypothetical situation. Imagine yourself a part of it as you read…

Your extended family planned a get-together and decided to meet at a restaurant. Everyone reaches there, and you all find out that it is occupied for another two hours. And then you all decide you will never revisit the place.

Something similar can happen with your app. Unexpected volumes of incoming traffic can cause your app to crash if you don’t use a cloud solution that is flexible with natural dynamics.

It would be best to choose a cloud that self-adjusts capacity and security coverage accordingly to serve an ample number of users simultaneously. This is one of the best cloud security advantages.

  • Robust Data Security in the Cloud

Depending on your industry domain, your data can be anything — customer names, phone numbers, addresses, personal information, etc. The crux of the matter is that it is essential to protect it regardless of the data type. A robust cloud solution protects your data throughout its lifecycle — from creation to destruction.

  • Regulatory Compliance Check

If you are still considering ‘why is cloud security important’, this point will convince you. Advanced cloud security safeguards the apps through its enhanced infrastructure. Such solutions have smart parameters that ensure that your app on the cloud meets the regulatory standards.

Having explained why cloud security is important and how the benefits of cloud security make daily working easy, let’s move ahead to discovering the world’s best cloud security platforms.

Most Famous Cloud Computing Platforms

Cloud security companies offer numerous cloud computing security solutions like SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS technologies. Although there might be slight differences in the pros and cons, they entail:

  • AWS — Amazon Web Services
  • Vultr
  • CloudFormation
  • GCP — Google Cloud Platform
  • Google WorkSpace (formerly, GSuite)
  • Alibaba Cloud
  • Bluelock
  • Adobe Creative Cloud Security
  • Centurylink
  • DXC
  • Cisco
  • Citrix

What are the Types of Cloud Computing Security Solutions?

Earlier, four types were differentiated based on location and ownership. But, after the advancements, the difference is more subjective than objective. It is not that simple anymore. Read the details below to understand the distinction.

  • Public Clouds

Virtual environments are partitioned and redistributed to multiple tenants. These small parts are called public clouds.

These are created in the IT infrastructure. However, the ownership is not with the end-users. Unlike the old times, the latest public clouds provide cloud services on clients’ on-premise data centers.

  • Private Clouds

The cloud environments solely dedicated to particular clients are the private clouds, and a user client gets complete isolated access to the data and space within.

Two sub-categories of private clouds are mentioned below:

  1. Managed Private Clouds — Startups or understaffed enterprises use these cloud security managed services. These are deployed, configured, and managed by a third-party vendor, so nothing but money is what the company has to spend.
  2. Dedicated Private Clouds — A cloud within another cloud! This means you can have a private cloud within a private or public cloud.
  • Hybrid Clouds

Hybrid cloud computing combines the on-premises private cloud with a public cloud. You can share data files and apps between the elements.

Agility is one of the top benefits of choosing hybrid clouds for their business process automation. Companies dealing with sensitive data use hybrid clouds for their daily work. (Like — Healthcare facilities store the personal data of patients.)

  • Multi-Clouds

Last types of cloud security services but not the least, as the name suggests, this cloud computing model deals with multiple combinations of clouds together. It looks like this — two or more private clouds, two or more public clouds, or a combination of public and private clouds.

Xekera Systems is not only an expert in Cloud Application Development Services. We are a certified cloud security professional company for managing, automating, and monitoring the client’s environment. We believe to provide the high quality cloud security solutions for your cloud based app.

The network security scope has many threats lying on the head, but instead of gloom and doom, choose to secure your company’s environment in the cloud only with one of the best cloud security companies.

We hope that this blog helped you to understand everything — ‘What is Cloud Security?’ ‘How to get the best cloud security solutions?’ to ‘How to Secure Your Company’s Environment in the Cloud?’

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