Research on the Evolving State of Cloud Security
Spring 2014
Executive Summary
ATTACKS INCREASED ACROSS ALL INCIDENT TYPES in both on-premises and CHP environments.
ENTERPRISES CONTINUE TO ADOPT CLOUD, FOCUS ON SECURITY
In early 2012, Alert Logic launched the first in a series of reports on cloud security, with the goal of creating the IT industry’s first assessment of security in the cloud for businesses considering the use of cloud computing platforms.
Alert Logic’s approach to these assessments, based on data associated with a large concentration of cloud workloads—i.e., the Alert Logic customer base— has proven to be a pragmatic way of gaining insight into the evolving state of security in the cloud.
As cloud adoption grows, Alert Logic has observed a shift in security concerns. While cloud security remains a major concern, the business benefits of moving applications to the cloud are too compelling to resist. Now, having largely committed to a cloud strategy, IT professionals are redirecting their focus to finding the best ways to secure their cloud-based applications and data.
In the current Cloud Security Report, Alert Logic continues its practice of uncovering trends that threaten both cloud and on-premises environments.
Two interesting observations have emerged. First, there has been an increase in attack frequency in both on-premises and cloud hosting provider (CHP) environments. Second, as more enterprise workloads move into cloud-hosted infrastructure, traditional on-premises infrastructure threats follow. These observations are intuitively consistent with the growing adoption of cloud
services in the enterprise.
KEY FINDINGS FROM THE LATEST DATA SET
Drawing on security data obtained from both on-premises and CHP infrastructure end-users between April 1 and September 30, 2013, Alert Logic found the following:
- Attacks increased across all incident types, in both on-premises and CHP environments, with only one exception, suggesting more attacks of all types are occurring.
- CHP environments saw significant increases in attacks, with brute force attacks climbing from 30% to 44% of customers, and vulnerability scans increasing from 27% to 44%. These two types of incidents have historically been far more likely to target on-premises environments, but are now occurring at near equivalent rates in both CHP and on-premises environments.
- Malware/botnet attacks, historically the most common attacks in the on-premises datacenter, are on the rise in CHP environments.
