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Security fears should not drive infrastructure decisions

Kirsten Doyle
By Kirsten Doyle, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 27 Mar 2013

Although companies have realised the benefits of cloud for a while, they still have concerns about security. There is also a wide belief that the cloud is inherently less secure than the traditional enterprise data centre.

A report, dubbed "State of Cloud Security" by secure cloud solutions company Alert Logic, tests and challenges this assumption by comparing threat data from enterprise data centres and cloud hosting provider (CHP) environments where public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure is hosted.

Taken from Alert Logic's customers, the data reveals the nature of real attacks taking place in everyday environments, instead of hypothetical conclusions drawn from honeypot networks or simulated user environments.

One billion security events were observed during the study period, and were automatically evaluated and correlated through the company's system, and reviewed by its analysts.

Cloud vs data centre

The most interesting facts revealed by the report were, firstly, that the cloud is not inherently less safe than the data centre. Secondly, that attacks in CHP environments are usually opportunistic crimes, while data centres are the focus of more sophisticated and targeted attacks.

The company explains: "Given all of the concerns around security in the cloud, enterprise data centres still house most of an organisation's high-value data - intellectual property, trade secrets, sensitive personal information - making them attractive targets for purposeful, criminal attacks."

Web application attacks

Finally, the report revealed that Web application attacks remain the most significant threat for CHP and enterprise data centre environments, with 52% and 39% of customers impacted, respectively.

Most of these attacks employ freely available tools such as Havij, an automated SQL Injection tool that helps penetration testers find and exploit SQL Injection vulnerabilities on a Web page.

The company says it is no surprise that brute force is a leading attack vector, responsible for 30% of experienced incidents at CHP environments and 49% of incidents at enterprises, as the technique is tried and tested and known to pay off with a little persistence. "For much the same reason, we observed a high occurrence of vulnerability scans (27% CHP, 28%enterprise)."

Moving to the cloud

In conclusion, the report says that while its findings do not suggest that one environment is more secure than the other, the differences should be considered when deciding which workloads should be moved to the cloud, and which monitoring and security technologies are most important.

The outcome stressed by Alert Logic is that fears surrounding cloud security should not drive infrastructure decisions. "In both environments, the fundamentals of sound security practices continue to apply, though each environment should pay special attention to the areas where they are most vulnerable."

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