Public cloud allows for safer workloads

Through 2020, public cloud IaaS workloads will suffer at least 60 percent fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers, says Gartner.

The US research firm has concluded that the security posture of major cloud providers is as good as or better than most enterprise data centers, and that security should no longer be considered a primary inhibitor to the adoption of public cloud services.

However, simply moving on-premises workloads to a public cloud doesn’t automatically make these workloads more secure. New approaches are needed that exploit the programmatic infrastructure of public cloud IaaS providers. If these capabilities are properly leveraged, the workloads will be better protected than those in most traditional enterprise data centers.

Successful attacks typically result from misconfiguration, mismanagement, missing patches and mistakes; thus, the more automation is used to remove and reduce human error (and to tackle the patching problem), the more secure services will be.