Survey Shows that Cloud Apps Somewhat More Secure Than On-Premises Apps

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Security is often a showstopper for cloud computing proposals, but at least one survey suggests that applications and data may be somewhat more secure out in the cloud than within on-premises systems.

In fact, cloud-based applications are less likely to be attacked than on-premises environments, a new study of 70,000 security breaches for a 12-month period across 1,600 companies, released by by Alert Logic, a security vendor, concludes…

An area of greater vulnerability is “web application attacks “– seen more frequently in the cloud. The study’s authors define a web application attack as “attacks targeting the presentation, logic or database layer of Web applications.” Overall, Web application attacks remain the most significant threat for service provider environments (53% customers impacted) and the second most significant threat in on-premise environments (44% of customers impacted).

However, on-premises Web application systems get hammered more frequently with attacks, the study shows. The average number of web application attacks is 61.4 among on-premise customers and 27.8 on service provider customers. Brute force attacks and reconnaissance attacks were also experienced with higher frequency in on-premises environments…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2012/09/19/cloud-apps-somewhat-more-secure-than-on-premises-apps-survey/