Seven Reasons Why Public Cloud Is Securely Driving The As-A-Service Economy

Author: Jack Sepple, Senior Managing Director of Cloud, Accenture

In today’s outcome-driven economy, we’re seeing more and more businesses adopting processes they can plug into quickly—delivered as-a-service. To compete in an increasingly connected, always-on world, they seek the flexibility to start small, pay only for the services they use, quickly discern what’s working from what’s not and continue driving results. And they want to do it all at scale.

Like any business model, the as-a-service approach requires strict security protocols. Operating in this environment calls for comprehensive, proactive and adaptive threat protection embedded into the fabric of the digital business.

As more businesses turn to cloud solutions to compete and thrive in the as-a-service space, they must make important decisions around which cloud will best meet their outcomes-driven business needs. Doing so requires dispelling certain myths about public cloud, chief among them the idea that private is more secure. The fact of the matter is that public cloud tends to be a more secure platform.

Here are the top seven reasons why public cloud’s security reputation merits closer scrutiny:

1. Availability — A cloud service provider (CSP) such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services typically has the geographic distribution and scale that can offer reliability and resilience far beyond what most datacenters can achieve.
2. Skilled Resources — What we call Tier 1 CSPs are staffed with large pools of skilled security practitioners who have extensive experience in identifying, containing and eradicating security threats.
3. Incident Response/Malware Protection — CSPs have massive data sets, compute power and advanced security analytics to perform analysis through security intelligence systems.
4. Depth — CSPs are embedding security intelligence into the foundation of their as-a-service operations, protecting their own infrastructure and alerting customers to potential hazards and attacks. Providers perform this foundational security service day in an day out, detecting and preventing a broad spectrum of security attacks—many that one enterprise alone might never see.
5. Physical Security — CSPs manage physical access, perimeter security and surveillance. Additionally, a provider’s hosting facility, associated policies and procedures have remarkably high standards and maturity levels.
6. DevOps Agility/Efficiency — Public CSP infrastructure models allow for system architectures that assume and account for security failures. If a server goes down or becomes infected, CSPs can easily decommission and spin up a new one.
7. Disaster Recovery — The speed, automation and low cost of public cloud infrastructure facilitates a flexible selection of hot, warm and cold server deployment models. This means that the right solution can be deployed based on recovery metrics and importance of business function.

More and more industry observers are discovering the benefits of public cloud. Where availability is concerned, TechRepublic recently pointed out that big, reliable CSPs typically offer “around-the-world redundancy and even ensur[e] that certain data centers are located on different seismic plates.”

And public cloud is saving users big costs (and big headaches)—because cloud systems have 24/7/365 monitoring, they have a favorable track record of uptime. According to Infor, public cloud users experience

fewer service disruptions and quicker recovery, reducing downtime by 72% and saving nearly $32,600 per application per year.

Read full article: www.forbes.com/sites/accenture/2016/02/17/seven-reasons-why-public-cloud-is-securely-driving-the-as-a-service-economy/