Public cloud the safer option, claims report

On-premises applications are 50 per cent more likely to suffer a cyber security incident than those running on public cloud platforms, according to a report published this week by Alert Logic

The company, which itself specialises in providing security solutions for the cloud, released the document following analysis of data from around 3,800 of its customers over an 18-month period.

The figures state that public cloud users experienced 405 security incidents during that time, compared with 612 suffered by on-premises clients. Hosted private cloud incidents were 69 per cent higher (684) meanwhile, while hybrid cloud users underwent a comparatively whopping 977 attacks.

Other findings included a particular vulnerability regarding web applications, which accounted for 73 per cent of all incidents, the most popular of which were ‘injection-style’ attacks.

Speaking of the metrics, senior vice president of technical and product marketing Misha Govshteyn said: "We focused our analysis on incident types and the workloads and environments most at risk. Cyber attackers continue to seek the weakest spots in network defenses and businesses need to understand how they are refocusing to take advantage of the changing attack landscape."

According to Alert Logic, there were more than two million security incidents captured by its intrusion detection systems during the analysis period, which ended in January of this year. These equated to around 147 petabytes of data.