Highly Rated and Recommended
We're rated Excellent 4.2/5 stars on G2 - with 95+ verified reviews
While cloud computing has been around since the 90s, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that it became a mature IT industry. Today, it not only powers the internet but also enables service delivery across the world.
According to Gartner, cloud computing is a buoyant industry. Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecasted to grow to $332.3 billion this year- about 23.1% up from 2020. With this growth, cloud infrastructure security is imperative. IT leaders must start considering security when developing their cloud strategy and building digital experiences on the cloud.
This blog post will give you an overview of what you need to know about this increased need for security. We will discuss how to secure your cloud infrastructures and how dotCMS can help you secure your digital assets.
The early days of the internet featured slow and cumbersome data transmission. In order to run programs, people had to have their local computer connected to a physical server somewhere on the planet.
Nowadays, cloud computing eliminates the need for local computers to be physically connected to a server. Companies do not need to own or rent physical storage to host their websites, applications, and digital assets. From this, the software-as-as-service model (Saas) was created. SaaS-based software takes cloud computing a step further enabling users to connect and use software from everywhere and see updates in real-time.
As you can imagine, the security advantages of building software in the cloud are many, prompting the shift of many industries to focus on the cloud. For the first time in 2020, enterprises spent more on the cloud than self-hosted computing. Statista even reported a 35% increase from 2020 which is nearly $160 billion USD.
Learn More: Moving to The Cloud | dotCMS Report
To understand cloud content management systems, let’s take a look at the self-hosted and CMSs cloud systems.
Self-hosted platforms require users to download the software and install it on a local server. To use the software, the user must be physically connected to the server. Traditional platforms also require that the user maintains and updates both the software and the infrastructure, introducing complexities and security risks to your digital assets. Also, in self-hosted models, users need to manage security and compliance, which presents malicious actors with an attack vector they can exploit.
Cloud CMSs are SaaS-based and hosted on the cloud through a cloud computing service such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Users do not need to be physically connected to a server to run cloud based software. This means stability and scalability for the end-user because the CMS vendor handles deployment, hosting, security, updates, upgrades and maintenance. Cloud CMSs save not only the end-user money and resources but also time and headaches.
Read More: What is a Cloud CMS: Everything You Need to Know
While the cloud presents many possibilities for businesses looking to scale, it also grants them increased protection against both internal and external threats. Let’s take a closer look at the security benefits of a cloud CMS.
According to Cloudflare, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting consumer service companies have increased by 684% in 2021. These attacks can potentially crash a website for hours or days. It works by overwhelming the website servers so the website or app can no longer respond to legitimate user requests.
A cloud CMS can protect you from attacks. It has the security tools to monitor your network usage, to identify a DDoS threat, and disperse all that traffic to other access points to keep your website active under heavy traffic.
2020 saw an increase in data breaches due to unprepared companies adopting remote work initiatives. In fact, according to IBM, data breach costs rose from 3.86 million USD to 4.24 million USD- the highest average total cost in the last 17 years.
A cloud CMS can help you stay safe with the increased amount of threats. It offers enhanced security, especially with login credentials. Today, CMSs have tightened security against data breaches and placed security protocols to protect sensitive data and transactions at origin, in transit, and in-destination.
Companies handle more data than ever before. With that increase comes the issue of poor regulatory compliance. Along with security, compliance is crucial for every company. Content governance, are a set of guidelines around how content is hosted, created, managed, and published. Content governance is a must for organizations looking to scale and be compliant with local data privacy legislation. However, this requires robust workflow features and the ability to set roles and permissions for CMS users.
Cloud CMSs are often compliant with international data handling rules and regulations such as ISO 20071, GDPR, and CCPA. It can manage and maintain your and your customer’s personal and financial data, compliant and protected.
While growth is always good, it can break unprepared companies and become a double-edged sword. High traffic levels are welcome, but without a cloud CMS ready to scale, your infrastructure can suffer, bringing your site down with it.
A cloud-based CMS can help you with scaling as your needs grow, allowing your digital experiences to handle traffic spikes. It can also offer you pre-rendering capabilities and support for in-memory and disk caching to improve your website’s performance, even during heavy loads.
The more available your CMS is-the better. A CMS needs to offer users constant support and availability, so your digital experiences are always active and online. Cloud CMSs are designed to provide end-users with the best uptime, performance, and scalability of your website. Leveraging Azure or AWS cloud services and mechanisms like load balancing, autoscaling, and geo-replication allows cloud CMS’s to offer higher availability and support your load using CDNs and server clusters to keep your website performant.
Read More: 13 Benefits of Cloud Computing and Top FAQs
dotCMS’ PaaS model brings all the good things of the SaaS model —managed services for every part of the application— while also giving users the benefits of the cloud. dotCMS’s PaaS offering provides developers with the tools they need to create and host high-performing web applications on the cloud in a language-agnostic environment that allows developers to integrate the platform with other hosting services for greater flexibility and control over your company’s digital assets and digital experience platform. Uptime SLAs up to 99.98% and no API-rate limiting or throttling cater for high-performance all the time. dotCMS Cloud comes out of the box with a Global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to enhance digital experiences across the globe.
Unlike other PaaS-based CMSs, dotCMS Cloud takes away the maintenance burden from our customers giving them a lean, self-maintained solution while enabling centralized content delivery in a hybrid headless environment offering the best of both worlds (pure headless and traditional CMS).
dotCMS Cloud is the evolution of dotCMS as a Service in the cloud. It is best classified as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and runs on the Amazon AWS infrastructure in order to have global reach and compliance to local data privacy legislation. dotCMS ensures your security and compliance from day one. Keeping your data protected from unscrupulous eyes and malicious actors. Plus, dotCMS maintains, upgrades and updates (to newer versions of dotCMS) the infrastructure and the platform for you, keeping your data and assets updated and in line with legislation and security trends. With the unprecedented NoCode workflow management, roles and permissions, any content governance model can be supported with dotCMS.
dotCMS Cloud is built on top of the AWS cloud stack, which is the gold standard when it comes to cloud computing and certifications. dotCMS being a J2EE product in the core already comes with elevated security guardrails that PhP-native CMSs don’t have. In addition, dotCMS Cloud comes with a native Content Delivery Network (CDN) that helps to protect your application from DDoS attacks as well as enhanced content delivery. dotCMS Cloud offering also comes with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to help take the security measures to the next level. Since dotCMS Cloud is a PaaS offering, all customers have dedicated VPCs and a dedicated database: none of the dotCMS Cloud customers are sharing databases or any other cloud resources. Access to the authoring environment can be secured with your Oauth or SAML-based authentication and with IP Whitelisting. The latter also applies to your runtime environments. dotCMS is ready for containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes, ensuring greater portability and scalability via APIs and an open-source architecture. Lastly, dotCMS Cloud offers the optional support of VPN access to the authoring environment as well.
Here are some of the benefits of dotCMS Cloud:
No more managed services environments
Platform-as-a-Service with dedicated cloud resources
Content Delivery Network
Web Application Firewall
Command Line Interface
DevOps agility
Auto-scaling / auto-wiring
Availability up to 99.98%
Containerization
Seamless core dotCMS Upgrades
If you want to learn more about dotCMS Cloud, read more here: dotCMS Cloud Product Brief
The first episode of Real Talk, Real Trust covers AI’s role in building authentic engagement with clients. You can view the episode on YouTube and Spotify now, or read this blog to learn about their c...
This blog post will break down the two most popular intranet solutions: SharePoint and dotCMS to help you decide which is best for your company.
Recent events in the content management space, including WordPress's licensing disputes, have highlighted the critical need for stability in enterprise CMS platforms.
We're rated Excellent 4.2/5 stars on G2 - with 95+ verified reviews