The debate of how safe it is to move sensitive data to the cloud has been happening for a while. While it is a known fact that the public clouds have been safe places to store mission-critical and sensitive data, but for enterprises to accept, it took the current pandemic situation for this realization.
As per current reports, 69 percent of enterprises have moved or are moving mission-critical information to the cloud. The research also shows 65 percent of businesses are worried about migrating sensitive data, and the majority of them have security concerns. The key concern with enterprises that had an aversion from the cloud was, if your data is in the cloud, then it’s not in your data center. You have no physical access, can’t touch the server, therefore it must be unsecure or at risk.
At least for the past few years, the cloud has bettered the security capabilities of most on-premises systems. This happened when more security companies focused on cloud computing and they spent dollars on R&D, rather than on scaling up or investing on on-premises security systems.
It is a known fact that security is directly related to how enterprises have invested in proper security systems, and the talent who has implemented those systems. We accept nothing is 100 percent secure, but you’re more likely to have a stronger data security system in the public cloud than you are in your data center. On-demand access to state-of-the-art security systems being the primary reason for this.
So, why is everyone talking about moving mission-critical and sensitive data to the cloud? The COVID-19 pandemic, of course.
The pandemic exposed the issues which no one predicted with data security and data access for on-premises systems. There were situations where humans could not get into the data centers, and outages had to be fixed remotely, which for some issues (like equipment failure) is impossible.
Even though this increased cloud migration is a silver lining to the pandemic, still many enterprises are skeptical of the effectiveness of cloud-based security. The studies also show, more than half of those charged with moving data to the public cloud is still worried about it. Your organization still may have challenges around using the cloud for critical data, but the evidence shows that the cloud is a better platform for securing data.
