Critical analysis of cybersecurity strategies for data protection in the cloud: systematic review

Abstract

The widespread adoption of cloud computing has increased critical cyber threats, making it urgent to evaluate the effectiveness of conventional defense mechanisms. The objective of this research was to comparatively analyze modern cybersecurity strategies versus traditional methods in cloud environments. A systematic review was conducted under the PRISMA protocol, analyzing 65 articles from the Scopus database published between 2021 and 2025. The results reveal a technological transition where, although cryptography remains the predominant strategy in 49% of the studies, there is an accelerated growth of 38% in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence for proactive detection. It was also identified that unauthorized access and denial-of-service attacks continue to be the main threats. It is concluded that there is a methodological bias in the literature, which prioritizes efficiency metrics in simulations over real security validation; therefore, it is recommended to migrate to hybrid architectures validated in real operational scenarios to ensure information integrity.