Platform security matters, now more than ever

Last year, due to the global pandemic, the working world saw the biggest shift to the work-from-home phenomenon it has ever seen.

Businesses large and small alike sent their employees home and relied on cloud-based technology solutions to communicate with their teams as well as with external parties.

But as companies moved operations to the cloud, they also became increasingly exposed to cyber attacks.

Photo credit: Aleksandr Khakimullin / 123RF

“As more enterprises go on the cloud, more information – such as IT architecture, business apps, data assets, and the user information of millions of enterprises – is being stored on cloud platforms,” says Li Xiao, vice president of Alibaba and general manager of Alibaba Cloud’s intelligent security division.

However, cyber attacks are becoming more organized and larger in scale. Alibaba Cloud reported that the largest number of resource exhaustion DDoS attacks Alibaba Cloud defended in 2020 was 5.369 million queries per second. This year, Alibaba Cloud expects the average number of daily attacks on its platform to reach 6 billion. “Hence, ensuring the security of cloud platforms to engage overall threat and risk management is extremely important.”

Advancements in cyber defence

In the first half of 2020 alone, there was a 715% year-on-year increase in detected and blocked ransomware attacks.

In response to the growing concerns surrounding platform security, cloud service providers like Alibaba Cloud are ramping up their cloud-native security capabilities across a number of fronts. A 2020 Forrester report found that such firms have begun focusing their efforts on improving overall infrastructure security, particularly in areas such as data protection and encryption. They’ve also developed solutions to help businesses with simplified identity management and policy change management that don’t compromise on security – a particularly crucial consideration for companies whose operations were previously largely offline.

New technological advances in cloud-native security solutions such as container mirroring allow businesses to create a backup of their data, making them less vulnerable to ransomware attacks.

These cloud-native solutions, Xiao says, work much better than traditional security methods. “Traditional security can react only passively, they use separate products to solve specific threats. That’s inefficient and leaves businesses vulnerable, while cloud-based security adapts to changes and is able to solve problems upstream.”

Global research and advisory firm Gartner shared a similar viewpoint, touting cloud-native security as “the new normal” in a research paper published in May 2020.

Rising cloud players

With the growing need for platform security among enterprises, investment in cloud-native security solutions is expected to grow rapidly within the next few years to combat the growing threat of cyber attacks.

Alibaba Cloud’s total security solution embeds platform security features such as confidential computing, trusted execution environments, network security, and data security into cloud-native infrastructure. With the combined overall framework, users benefit from more efficient security on a single bandwidth.

According to Xiao, security has always been regarded as the foundation of Alibaba Cloud. While more clients have complex IT architecture, massive data, and huge assets, Alibaba Cloud continues to support them with simpler and easier security solutions to build a highly available and trusted cloud environment.

“There will be more innovations in the cloud security field,” Xiao says. “I look forward to helping users build next-generation security architectures through cloud-native security capabilities.”

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group. It provides a comprehensive suite of global computing services to startups, corporations, and government organizations worldwide.

Find out more about Alibaba Cloud’s range of cloud services here and follow the company on LinkedIn.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.