How secure is cloud computing?

Cloud computing, properly configured, is generally more secure than most SME's on-premises infrastructure, major cloud providers invest security resources at a scale individual businesses simply can't match. But "properly configured" is doing real work in that sentence, cloud security operates on a shared responsibility model, and misconfiguration on the customer's side remains one of the most common causes of cloud security incidents.

The Shared Responsibility Model, Explained Simply

Cloud providers secure the underlying infrastructure, physical data centre security, network infrastructure, the hardware itself. You (or your managed provider) remain responsible for securing what you put on top of that infrastructure, access controls, data encryption configuration, application security, and critically, who has permission to access what. A provider having excellent physical security doesn't protect you if an account with weak credentials and no MFA is compromised.

Where Cloud Security Actually Goes Wrong

• Misconfigured access permissions, storage or databases accidentally left publicly accessible when they should be restricted
• Weak or absent MFA on cloud admin accounts, one of the most damaging single points of failure
• Overly broad permissions, users or applications granted far more access than they actually need
• Unmonitored activity, no one actively watching for unusual access patterns or configuration changes

Notably, none of these are failures of the underlying cloud platform itself, they're configuration and management gaps on the customer side, exactly the kind of gap proper managed cloud administration is designed to close.

What Genuinely Strong Cloud Security Looks Like

• Least-privilege access, users and applications granted only the specific access they genuinely need, nothing broader
• MFA enforced on every account, particularly admin accounts
• Encryption for data both in transit and at rest
• Regular access reviews, removing permissions for staff who've changed roles or left the business
• Continuous monitoring for unusual activity or configuration drift

Compliance Certifications Worth Knowing About

Major cloud providers maintain extensive independent security certifications, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and others, demonstrating their infrastructure meets rigorous, independently audited security standards. These certifications are genuinely meaningful and worth requesting from any provider, but they cover the infrastructure layer, they don't certify that your specific configuration on top of that infrastructure is secure.

The Honest Comparison to On-Premises

A typical SME's on-premises server room, without dedicated security staff, without enterprise-grade physical security, without the resources for continuous monitoring, is very often less secure in practice than a properly configured cloud environment, even accounting for the shared-responsibility gaps described above. The question isn't "is cloud secure" in the abstract, it's "is our specific cloud configuration secure," which is a solvable, manageable problem.

Our Approach

We manage the customer side of the shared responsibility model directly, proper access configuration, MFA enforcement, ongoing monitoring, and periodic access reviews, so cloud security isn't left as an assumption that "the provider handles it," when in reality a meaningful part of the responsibility sits with how the environment is configured and managed day to day.