How Cloud impacts Application Security

This article is intended for software development and IT teams who want to securely build and deploy applications in cloud computing environments, specifically PaaS and IaaS.

Cloud computing mostly brings security benefits to applications, but as with most areas of cloud technology, it does require significant changes to existing practices, processes, and technologies that were not designed to operate in the cloud. At a high level, this balance of opportunities and challenges include:

Opportunities

• Higher baseline security. Cloud providers, especially major IaaS and PaaS providers, have significant economic incentives to maintain higher baseline security than most organizations. In a cloud environment, major baseline security failures completely undermine the trust that a public cloud provider needs in order to maintain relationships with its customer base. Cloud providers are also subject to a wider range of security requirements in order to meet all the regulatory and industry compliance baselines needed to attract customers from those verticals. These combine to strongly motivate cloud providers to maintain extremely high levels of security.

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