What is cloud security?

In today’s cloud-based world, the stacks of appliances that made up the traditional network security model have become increasingly ineffective and irrelevant. This antiquated, appliance-centric model forces all traffic through the centralized data center for security and access controls—a complex configuration that results in a terrible user experience.

This poor experience becomes more evident when users attempt to access cloud applications, such as Office 365, which were designed to be accessed directly through local internet breakouts. To support these and other bandwidth-hungry applications and to handle increases in network traffic—without added costs or complexity—organizations need a multi-tenant security platform that scales elastically. This can’t be achieved with a traditional network security architecture.

The move to the cloud has also made the concept of the traditional corporate network obsolete, with the internet, in essence, becoming the new corporate network. Network security stacks were not designed for the cloud and cannot provide the comprehensive protection that today’s cloud-based applications and mobile users need. The best way to secure apps and users—no matter where they connect—is by moving security and access controls to the cloud.

Unlike traditional hardware-based security, cloud security allows organizations to stay current with the latest security updates, keeping them protected from rapidly evolving malware and other sophisticated threats. Updating all of your appliances to keep up with the tens of thousands of new phishing sites and other threats that arrive daily is incredibly costly and practically impossible. However, cloud security solutions can be easily updated, minimizing costs and eliminating the complexity of patching, updating, and maintaining hardware and software.

With cloud security, security services are built directly into the platform, so they communicate with each other to give organizations a cohesive picture of all the traffic that’s moving across your network. Through a single interface, organizations gain insight into every request—by user, location, and device around the world—in seconds.

And, just like most of the applications organizations use today, a cloud security solution can be delivered as a service, reducing the cost and complexity of traditional appliance approaches.