It’s a fair question. It’s easy to assume that giving custody of your data—among your most valuable assets—to some nameless, faceless server farm somewhere in the cloud is inherently less secure than when it’s safe at home in your own data center.
But with careful design, configuration, and monitoring, hosting your data and applications in the cloud can in fact be much more secure than doing so locally.
The term “cloud” means different things to different people, so let’s review some of the terms and technology around cloud hosting.
First, “the cloud” is not “the internet” or “the World Wide Web.” The best way to think of “the cloud” is that cloud-based applications behave the same way that desktop applications do; the user should neither know nor care that the computational heavy lifting and data storage is actually occurring on a server in a building in another state or even another country.
In a typical cloud setup, a business purchases services from a cloud provider. Two of the most prominent cloud providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Services can take many forms, depending on the business need. Some examples include:
When you sign up for cloud services, you typically get one or more “virtual servers.” A virtual server is a server that is defined in software, and usually shares hardware resources (such as CPU cores, memory, and disk space) with other virtual servers. The virtual server model increases efficiency by minimizing the amount of time that hardware resources sit idle.
At AndPlus, we often recommend that our clients use a cloud model to deploy the applications we build for them. There are numerous advantages to cloud deployment:
To return to the question of cloud security: How can the security of your business-critical apps and data be maximized in the cloud? At AndPlus, we recommend one or more of several possible approaches:
There are other security options available as well. Even the cloud providers themselves don’t have access to your virtual servers (unless you let them). On top of all that, the cloud providers have Pentagon-tight physical security and multiple physical locations to ensure continuity in the event of a disaster at one of their sites.
Developing this kind of security independently would cost a fortune to implement, or to buy separately from a third-party provider, but the cloud services can provide it for an incremental cost as part of the subscription. Far from being a gaping security risk, cloud hosting can provide a better, more cost-effective security environment than hosting in your own data center.
At AndPlus, we are always looking for ways to maximize value for our clients, and the cloud is an increasingly attractive option. Call us today to explore options for your business-critical applications and data.