Cyber threats including data breaches, compromised credentials, broken authentication, hacked interfaces, account hijacking, malicious insiders, and permanent data loss have been happening for as long as companies have maintained records and stored private data. The proliferation of data, technological advances, and the digitization of data storage in the last decade or so has seen a sharp rise in the number of these cyber threats. Leveraging these developments, cybercrime is evolving.

Companies are now increasingly concerned about how they handle and store their personal data. They often look at multiple options to store data safely. An often-used option is to store data locally, on cloud, and some may choose to go with hybrid storage. But how secure is your data storage solutions? Is your sensitive data safer on-premise or cloud?

On-Premise Security

All security functions of the organization reside on-premises.  This could be one location or it could include several remote branches with security distributed accordingly.  The big characteristic here is that the security is completely on-site, and nothing is hosted in the cloud. Keeping a local servers has few advantages such as increased control over critical data, however, inflexible IT budgets can create a struggle to develop the security expertise required to keep business’ data secure.

On-Premise security also requires a significant investment. Keeping physical servers means added operational costs for maintenance, system upgrades, cooling equipment, and power delivery tools. You also need to set-up a lot of electricity to sustain power to these servers.

Since most businesses are now operating in a hybrid environment with Microsoft applications, while incrementally moving users to the cloud, the on-premise security model is outdated for most industries.

Cloud Security

Cloud computing or Cloud is the delivery of computing services— storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and more—over the Internet (“the cloud”). It refers to saving data to an off-site storage system maintained by a cloud provider. Instead of storing information to your computer’s hard drive or other local storage device, you save it to a remote database. The Internet provides the connection between your computer and the database.

Cloud is a virtual environment that can adapt to meet user needs. It is not constrained by physical limits, and is easily scalable – making it the best choice for start-ups. Not like on-premise solutions, cloud eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, the IT experts for managing the infrastructure.

Cloud services and software applications are managed and upgraded off-site by the provider. The popularity of the cloud essentially comes down to its provision of advanced, next-generation IT resources in an environment that is cheaper and more scalable than local networks.

Though cloud computing offers many benefits like cost-efficiency, reliability, and accessibility it also has a number of risks that organizations needs to observe.

There can be technical outages/downtime that can lead to temporary suspension of business process and if internet connection is offline, accessing applications, server and data from the cloud is not possible.

And although cloud providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks. Using cloud-powered technologies means you need to be connected to the internet to be able to access your data and nothing connected to the internet is perfectly secure. Every component potentially accessible from the Internet is vulnerable to attacks so be very careful with choosing the cloud provider to cater your business security requirements.

By working with the right managed service provider, the task of securing your organization’s sensitive data can be made easier. If you need to learn more about On-Premise IT Infrastracture and Cloud Computing Services, Motionwave Technologies is here to help. Contact our team at 1300 337 984.