The assertion in based on the results of a survey carried out by the organisers of the 360°IT Event, the successor to StorageExpo, which found that over half of organisations believe that cloud computing will result in an improvement in their security defences.

The survey – which took in responses from 271 IT professionals – also found that a fifth of respondents thought there would be no improvement and a quarter of organisations said that it would be detrimental.

Commenting on the results, Richard Hall, CEO of CloudOrigin, said that the current trend of businesses migrating their IT systems into the cloud does not mean a reduction in security defences. Far from it, he says, as he has concluded that cloud technology actually raises the industry's game on the security front.

"After decades performing forensic and preventative IT security reviews within banking and government, it was already clear to me that the bulk of security breaches and data losses occur because of a weakness of internal controls", he said in his blog.

According to Hall, the complete automation by public cloud providers means the dynamic provision, use and re-purposing of a virtual server occurs continuously within encrypted sub-nets.

The process, he says, occurs out of sight of operations staff and without any of the manual interventions that might introduce unintended weaknesses.

"That's why solutions built on commodity infrastructure provided by the likes of Amazon Web Services have already achieved the highest standards of operational compliance and audit possible – for example in healthcare (HIPAA), credit cards (PCI DSS) and audit (Sarbanes Oxley, SAS70)", he explained.

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