Cloud companies are struggling to balance security against availability and privacy. New innovative security methods are being developed to create this balance, but the future of Cloud Security is in the hands of data centers.
A significant change will be the continuous monitoring of applications. There will be a shift from periodic assessments to ongoing continuous audits of an entire environment’s security and compliance status.
Visualization alone can pour fuel on the fire. Goal-oriented visualization is critical to ensure you’re using the information to solve real problems. Even problems you don’t know you have.
Enterprise adoption of cloud-native infrastructure and microservices will require security controls to increasingly be built-in, automated, and capable of consistently and dynamically protecting distributed applications wherever they are deployed.
Adoption of SDN platforms is allowing companies to connect to cloud infrastructures in a more secure and compliant manner, instead of as carve-outs to existing security policies.
I expect to see technologies that deliver real-time distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation by automatically analyzing DDoS alerts and essentially stopping DDoS attacks before they do real damage.
Keeping data safe will gain greater focus over the next few quarters. Cloud service providers will need to balance security with usability to remain competitive.
We will continue to see less reliance on hardware and greater acceptance of security functions embedded in the network itself.
We’ll see an increase in companies prioritizing global compliance standards and certifications – like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) – which protect personally identifiable information on the cloud.
Virtualization technologies such as NFV and SDN will provide communication service providers with the opportunity to deliver enhanced security services to their customers. Centralization, flexibility and agility are key to these improvements.
Administrators and end users will have the ability to proactively eliminate security issues before they happen. Cloud security is evolving quickly on all fronts through security dashboards and audit controls to make this possible.
Cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) will become more familiar to the general public and will require additional technologies and security postures to re-bolster consumer confidence in the cloud environment.
The proliferation of IoT devices, which typically store and share data in the cloud, will lead to increased focus and pressure to ensure cloud data storage and transmission security.
The complexity of current security solutions limits their application. We expect a shift towards more homogenous security, simplifying cloud security infrastructure. This is critical as vastly more objects become connected.
The cloud security focus will shift from access control to infrastructure to access control for data. Apart from security and confidentiality there will be a major emphasis on integrity of data.
Ransomware attacks will increasingly attack not only primary systems but in addition will attack backup systems based upon Windows.
The biggest change: access. There is a lot of emphasis and innovation taking place now on ways to privately, reliably and securely connect to disparate cloud environments, infrastructures and applications.
I predict that cloud security will become more consumer-focused. The enterprise cloud security-as-a-service space is crowded, and a new generation of mobile internet consumers is looking to protect themselves.
A major focus in cloud security will be a push for better protection and detection at the endpoint. The endpoint still remains one of the most vulnerable and often-hacked areas of an online transaction.
How do we know who is accessing the cloud security tech? The tie-in of biometrics will provide greater security and usability with assurance of identity.
The focus will shift from “Do I keep security servers on-premises or use cloud services?” to “It’s critical to use cloud and on-premises security in a hybrid environment.”
As more traffic is encrypted—and thus indecipherable—we anticipate increased endpoint modeling technologies to analyze traffic patterns, and compare those to a baseline as a means to thwart cyberattacks.
We will continue to see organizations building private clouds, which offer more control and security than public cloud services. Having complete ownership of your cloud is the most secure option.