There is no doubt that Internet has surely grown to become an almost extension of our daily lives, but, it is a dangerous place. Anyone in the IT field is aware that viruses, spam, and malicious Web sites exist and information at the hands of a spammer or a hacker can do the trick easily.

For quite some time, knowledge or information on Internet based attacks and vulnerabilities was the domain of specialized security gurus just a few years ago. But the need

to understand computer security has spread beyond the domain of specialists today.

Web Threats Galore
A large number of users and IT professionals still surf Web sites with ease and impunity. The list of protective measures is quite long, hardware and software firewalls, virus

scanners, browser protection, more vigilant Web site administration, and User Access Control, just to name a few. So how could any malware possibly get to the computer,

much less infect it?
The reality is that attackers are only concerned with one goal and that is making money. For as long as there is money to be made by attacking computers, attackers will

find a way to do so.

 Security on the Cloud
In light of the above trends in security, the idea of cloud computing is not new. Offloading a portion of IT tasks to a service provider is a concept that has been in use for

years and a number of big and small companies have actually done it quite well.

This has been especially true for processing large volumes of data or crunching numbers. In recent years, technology has evolved to allow virtually any task to be offloaded in

this way. Tasks such as word processing and email can be handled as cloud‐based services today where they were inflexible just a short time ago.

Like these other technology services on the go, security is now available as a hostable cloud service as well. Cloud security approaches are being quickly recognized as a

highly‐effective defense mechanism.

Security with the help of cloud‐based solutions has a number of benefits:
• Fewer attacks reach the corporate resources, reducing the risk of any security gaps or flaws being exploited
• Reduced strain on corporate resources (for example, less Web traffic reduces network traffic)
• Corporate policy enforcement - for example, Web site filtering implemented by a neutral third party, reducing animosity while enforcing policy and security

The way forward

As today ever‐changing demands of corporate users don’t allow IT professionals to turn off Web access, even to websites that are often considered unrelated to work. But

Information technology ecosystem must still enforce security measures to protect corporate assets on the long run.

In today’s constantly‐changing security landscape, this requirement is more of a challenge than ever before. And cloud‐based Web security offers a number of benefits in

addressing these challenges. Most of these benefits result in a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) while maintaining the functionality and flexibility that users demand.

This trend is likely to define the way small and big enterprises look at going in for an amalgamation of cloud and security infrastructure.