What is more secure, cloud servers or traditional servers?

27th June 2025

While cloud seems to be the future of computing, could it be putting your systems at greater risk?

Recently, more and more people have been transitioning elements of their IT to cloud based solutions. With more flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency, cloud solutions make a lot of sense for businesses.

From a cyber security perspective though, we wondered if cloud was an improvement, or if traditional onsite servers were the safer option? To explore this we have broken down some common breach factors to see the difference between the two:

Misconfiguration – errors can occur within your cloud system if it is not set up correctly. The process is very complex, leaving mistakes that can lead to breached. This can still happen with the setup of traditional servers, but is less likely.

Credential theft – by stealing private information like passwords, your servers can be put at risk. The risk to traditional servers exists, but is limited to internal access; on the other hand, cloud servers can be accessed by anyone from anywhere, provided they can get past your security measures.

Insider threats – while internal staff pose a threat to traditional servers, cloud servers also have the risk of being attacked by someone from within the cloud provider’s own organisation, increasing the opportunity for a breach.

Malware – for cloud users, this spreads via shared cloud environments; for traditional server users, it spreads across internal networks, working in the same wat across two different platforms.

DDoS attacks – in this instance, cloud can easily absorb these attacks due to the scale of cloud organisations. For those using traditional servers, other steps need to be taken, or you risk being impacted by the attack.

From this, you might expect that cloud is the less safe option. However, the defensive measures that cloud servers allow – such as identity & access management, multi-factor authentication, encryption, monitoring tools and patch management – mean that cloud is better protected than traditional servers.

Most of the security in traditional servers is done manually and is limited by hardware and budget: there are less opportunities for a breach to occur, but more of an impact if it does.

If you would like more information about the cyber security involved in cloud computing, please contact Interfuture Security.