Application Security in the Cloud Is Still Cloudy

IBM shared a security related infographic via Twitter recently and in looking through the statistics (most of which are attributed to 2011 research, by the way) I happened to catch a statement claiming “The average company is attacked 60,000 times a day.”
IBM notes that “average” is average for the study, which consisted of mostly large enterprises, and while I’m certain there are still experts who would dispute this claim (it’s higher! it’s lower! That’s only an average of a subset of a selection of a …) for me it raised an interesting question with respect to attacks and cloud-based applications: If your application is deployed in the cloud, how do you if/when it’s being attacked? Perhaps more importantly, though, is whether or not you should know. After all, “the cloud” is taking care of all that infrastructure and networky stuff under the covers for you, right? And one of those “stuff” is addressing attacks.

read more