In many ways and for most organizations the cloud is more secure than premises-bound security.  It’s easy to understand why: The most widely deployed IaaS architectures are more advanced than their traditional stack counterparts, many of which have been architected over decades based on changing priorities and user demands.

Yet a recent and timely blog from Junaid Islam raises a fair point: clouds can become malware super spreaders:

"The increasing number of personal compute devices and supply chain partners connecting to enterprise clouds makes universal endpoint protection impossible. Subsequently, malware can find and propagate from infected compute devices to cloud-based applications. Once infected, hosted apps can become malware super spreaders. However as bad as the risk of malware is to enterprises, the risk to IoT systems is even greater."

"The new generation of IoT devices has the ability to autonomously communicate locally and globally.  As IoT devices come in hundreds of different variations with specialized software modules, patching IoT systems is far more difficult than personal compute devices."

"Infected IoT devices can spread malware from autonomous vehicles and energy management systems to consumer products and cloud computers - and then back again.  A malware attack on billons of networked IoT devices would take months or years to correct."

You can read the entire blog here: Malware Will Cripple Cloud and IoT Infrastructure if not Contained