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What is the difference between cloud security vs. traditional security?

As more and more companies adopt cloud computing, it is becoming hard for them to cope with both traditional and cloud security. The truth is that many of the cloud security measures are quite similar to traditional security measures like automation, access allocation, data protection, shift responsibilities, documentation and defining rules and security groups. However, a recent power outage in Managed Amazon Web Services caused hundreds of businesses to lose millions, to the extent that even those not located in the same region were affected. This outage had been the result of human errors and continues to be a prime concern for companies which have networks fully reliant on clouds.

While demands for online storage may be on the rise, both traditional and cloud security have their pros and cons. Both demand very high level of monitoring and there must be redundant systems in place for easy data accessibility. So, Gartner is of the opinion that simply using the cloud technologies is never enough as you should be concerned more with how you use cloud services. It is necessary to optimize applications for the cloud with the idea of getting maximum value from them at minimum costs. Unlike the possibility of a lock down for a private network using firewalls, there is not one-size-fits-all tool for cloud security. So, cloud security really depends on the enterprise. The business perimeter in a cloud can spread all across the globe; so, it is hard for a company to define it and also find means to protect this new perimeter. What the IT staff does for traditional security needs to be extended to cloud security, but chances of cloud server providers deploying the same security measures are less. So, businesses have to compensate by including additional security controls. With traditional data centers the companies own data and get to decide who accesses this data. But this data stewardship is not there in the cloud.