Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Cloud Security Trends
By Vladi Sandler, CEO, Lightspin
By 2025, it is projected that over 100 zettabytes (a billion terabytes or a trillion gigabytes) of data will be stored in the cloud. This represents about half the total global data storage. However, with over 94 percent of all workloads already processed in the cloud, the vast adoption of cloud technology raises a lot of implications for data security. Attack surfaces have also increased, with the astronomical growth of endpoints connected to the cloud, most of which can be accessed from both corporate and unsecured personal devices.
This need has increased the need of cloud security to protect the significant amount of personal and business data, intellectual property, and proprietary information now stored in cloud environments. But economic uncertainty has organizations scrutinizing every spend.
What will the coming year bring? How will organizations address these risks? And what will the vulnerability landscape look like? We’ve pulled together our list of predictions related to the broader cloud security market.
Greater Scrutiny on Security Spend
The current level of economic uncertainty will result in organizations placing more scrutiny on technology spend next year. While investments in cloud products and services will not entirely dip, companies will aim to maximize their cybersecurity budget to get more functionality for less. This means we’ll see growth in platform offerings instead of point solutions.
Organizations Fall Victim to More Cloud Security Mishaps
Cloud adoption will continue into 2023. Given Gartner’s assertion that through 2025, 99 percent of all cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault, organizations will place more emphasis on understanding the shared responsibility model. Those that do not understand the complex web of connections between all identities, identity chains, excessive permissions to data will succumb to vulnerabilities within their environment.
Multi-Cloud Adoption Grows
Next year we’ll see an increased focus on multi-cloud and resiliency. Two-thirds of organizations will have adopted at least two cloud providers by the end of 2023. This will prevent organizations from becoming too tied into one ecosystem. As organizations are more mindful of investments, we’ll see more emphasis on use-cases, and prioritization of the “right cloud for the job.” With 509+ AWS services alone, cloud is exploding in complexity so hiring talent and finding the right technology partners to manage and secure your cloud efficiently will be paramount for security leaders.
Application + Cloud Security = A Holistic Look at True Risk
Application security and cloud security will be brought together contextually to prioritize true risk. Organizations will buy into the idea that there’s no such thing as cloud security, but that the infrastructure exists to support applications and those applications being exploited or impacted for uptime are the true business risk.
Cloud security providers will need to provide contextual understanding of application security vulnerabilities and risks together with cloud security misconfigurations, over permissive roles and more to determine true prioritization of a security team’s time and efforts to reduce risk.
What are you seeing within your own organization? Anything to add? We’d love to hear your thoughts in response.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vladi Sandler is an avid security entrepreneur with more than twelve years of experience in cyber security domains. With vast expertise in managing teams and initiating new and innovative services, he established the comprehensive application security training program in EY and headed up the first Automotive Cloud Security team at Cymotive.
These roles, among others, allowed Vladi to acquire a clear idea of what was missing in the cloud security ecosystem. His entrepreneurial skills, coupled with his offensive outlook, make Vladi uniquely qualified to help organizations gain control of their cloud security stack.
