What are the security benefits of migrating your data to the cloud?
There’s lots of talk about cloud migration, which is moving your data to cloud-based data centres rather than hosting it on-premise. But what are the security benefits with migrating to the cloud?
Migrating data to the cloud presents lots of opportunities for your business, not just around security. To get an idea, cloud hosting is :
- Scalable: Ability to transform your infrastructure by scaling up and down quickly and easily
- Compliant: regulation and compliance procedures are in place. Global, regional and vertical markets all have their own regulations to comply with, making this area a massive but vital entity. Look at Microsoft’s compliance document to see the length and breadth they go to, ensuring compliance is followed.
- Cost effective: Based on a pay as you go model, so that rather than investing in the infrastructure and the staff to maintain it, cloud hosting cost effectively enables you to invest in other parts of your business.
- Secure: There are a host of security benefits which we go into in more detail further down.
- Enables remote working: Available 24/7, all of your team can quickly and easily access what they require from where ever they are located. User and group restrictions are in place to ensure access is only given to relevant members.
- Environmentally friendly: Not having to host the servers means that as a business you use less energy. Every business wants to lower their carbon footprint doesn’t it?
- Time Saving: automation is a key component of cloud computing, streamlining tasks that will improve efficiency and negate manual workload.
Security considerations: Comparing responsibilities for on-premise hosting with cloud-hosting
With on-premise hosting, all responsibility for security of that data is your own, you have full control and the responsibility that goes with that. With cloud hosted data, the responsibility for the security is shared between yourself and the hosting company, arranged into two categories.
Security in the cloud – this is the customers’ responsibility and covers ID, data protection, encryption and access management
Security of the cloud – this is the cloud service provider’s responsibility, covering the storage, maintenance and security. They also handle advanced threat detection and modelling. All cloud providers are responsible for the physical security of their data centre environments. They are also responsible for disaster recovery planning.
So, what are the security benefits to cloud migration?
The top 8 security benefits of cloud migration
- Reduced workload: Workload is reduced as the responsibility of the server is shared.
- Innovative: The latest cloud security innovations and techniques will be implemented to ensure that security breaches are prevented.
- Secure: Security is built-in at every step.
- Easy to manage: Managing access of users and networks, setting compliance and security is easy.
- Easy to monitor: It is easy to monitor, audit and fix any issues.
- Encryption is easy: For highly confidential and sensitive data the encryption can take place at every step whether it is at rest, in-motion or in-use. It is also far easier to set up encryption in the cloud that on-premise.
- Reduced workload .2: workload is reduced as many aspects are automated.
- Economies of scale: Finally, economies of scale are at play here. The cloud service providers invest in security on a massive scale which directly financially benefits the user, it would be impossible for a company or organisation to implement all that a service provider does to keep the data secure, 24/7.
If you would like more information on cloud-migration or data services, please don’t hesitate to contact us