Microsoft saw a 300% increase in cyber attacks globally over a recent 12 month period, according to a news report published in early October 2017. According to the article from ITPro, London, attacks have increased in sophistication, too, especially those that nation-states have launched.
The frequency, finesse, and viral circulation of these attacks have, according to the article, overwhelmed human interventions. As a result, Microsoft suggests a cloud-based approach to securing the enterprise.
The power and reach of the cloud make it a staunch ally in the war against cyber attacks. By using the scalability and expanse of the cloud and its ability to secure the enterprise from outside itself, you can safeguard your organization against attacks from the ubiquitous and far-reaching web/internet. Seven signs say the cloud is a great solution.
Seven benefits of cloud-based cybersecurity
- Scale. The cloud can quickly scale up to handle the prevalence and density of attacks wherever these infest your organization, regardless of the load, and without taxing your hardware and resources. The cloud is natively-equipped to carry and balance the load despite the glut of attacks.
- Visibility. The old adage, “Physician, heal yourself” presents an informing parallel to companies’ cybersecurity problems, pointing to the cloud as the answer. As a medical doctor should look to another physician, who can treat them with a complete view of their health, and without the biases that come with being too close to the problem, in the same way, companies should defer to the cloud as the “surgeon” for their cyber ills. The cloud can act as a distributed web gateway that examines traffic from well beyond the organization and any of its assets, and from every angle. Where a company has limited visibility into its vulnerabilities and compromises, the view from the cloud comes without any blindsides.
- The as-a-Service model. Rather than invest in on-site ownership, tuning, maintenance, upkeep, and interpretation of cybersecurity tools such as IDS/IPS, behaviour-based sandboxing and network anomaly detection, you can pay for cyber protection as a service in the cloud. This model enables you to share the costs with others who use the service, get up and running with best in class tools, and see ROI as swiftly as the decline in successful attacks, breaches lost data, and damaged reputations.
- Defense against DDoS attacks. The cloud has the resources to fight DDoS attacks by inspecting and tagging attack traffic, cleaning/scrubbing it, and rerouting it to your organization with only a few milliseconds in delays.
- Release from Ransomware attacks. The cloud can observe malicious behaviours such as rapid simultaneous changes in large numbers of files that are typical of ransomware attacks and drop the associated connection instantaneously.
- Threat intelligence. The cloud can pull threat intelligence from across many customers around the world and analyze it to orchestrate updates such as to firewall rules and malicious behaviours that trigger sandboxing, for example.
- Filters everything. The cloud can filter the web and all content for all protocols at all ports in real-time. The cloud can offer stream-based defenses and fine-grain filtering by user and category.
Not the half of it
There is so much more that a cloud-based cybersecurity solution can do. It can redirect traffic, provide location-aware security and data routing for compliance, enable storage and backups, and institute advanced protection for outbound and inbound traffic. And that is still not the half of it.
David D. Geer (https://www.linkedin.com/in/daviddgeer/) writes about cybersecurity and technology for national and international publication. David’s work appears in various trade magazines from IDG in the U.S. and around the world in several languages. ScientificAmerican, The Economist Technology Quarterly, and many magazines and companies have used David’s content. David’s Google Scholar Page is at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZkKA3fsAAAAJ&hl=en.
View the original press release by iboss.