Study Indicates Cloud Environments are More Secure than On-Premise

According to a study released by AlertLogic, the variety and frequency of security threats was greater in on-premise hosting environments than in cloud hosting environments.

In a call to the Web Host Industry Review, Urvish Vashi, VP of Marketing at AlertLogic, said: “We looked at 12 months of data across 1,500 customers. We analyzed 2.2 billion events, and essentially correlated that down using our expert system and our team of security analysts in order to identify 62,000 validated security incidents across seven classes of incident. And this wasn’t just for the purposes of this report. This is what we do for a living. So we think it’s a meaningful body of data from which to draw conclusions. We believe this is the industry’s first data-driven comparative analysis of threats in service provider environments versus on-premise.”

The data contained in the study could indicate that many concerns about cloud environment security could be based on assumptions rather than on data.

“On-premise environments were 12 times more likely to have misconfiguration incidents in their environments.,” said Vashi. “We think that’s kind of a big deal. If you think about things like patch management and basic good security hygiene, service providers are in the business of doing that for a living, and it’s interesting to see that the data sort of bears that out.”

The AlertLogic report suggests that security risks and vulnerability are more likely influenced by factors such as IT surface area, the diversity of the environments, and the workload in those environments, rather than on the difference between the cloud and on-premise environments.

This study could give cloud hosting providers the data they need to convince wary customers that cloud hosting is in fact more secure than on-premise hosting.

Category: Cloud, Hosting News