Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016.  Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Rohit Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Palerra

2016 Cloud and Security Predictions

Threat to the IoT

In 2016, there will be a large increase in both the privacy and threat exposure of wearable devices, medical devices, and smart cars. For example:

• Hacking into cars' computers to cause a massive incident on the road
• Stealing PHI data from systems monitoring patient medical devices
• Accessing personal information about a user's electrical and water usage in their home
  

APIs on Demand

We expect to see cloud vendors selling APIs as new revenue streams. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS vendors will be pressured to provide rich sets of APIs, enabling security vendors and application vendors to provide value added services.

"Big Data" hype will dwindle and machine learning will grow

Most enterprises have harnessed the power of Big Data to create better internal and external insights, but now companies want to gain even more value from their data, with an emphasis on real-time and predictive analytics. This is where machine learning will grow as it allows companies to do more with the data they have. In 2016 implementing machine learning platforms to increase efficiency and productivity will become imperative.

The Future of Threat Intelligence Platforms

Many vendors have focused on threat detection in their efforts to collaborate with each other, such as sharing virus signatures, to offer the quickest response to threats. While collaboration across threat detection vendors is common, such collaboration does not yet exist for indicators of compromises (IoC's). As we accept the notion that hackers will at some point be successful and compromises will occur (a matter of "when," not "if"), an increasing number of vendors will focus on the quickest way to reliably detect compromises.  As IoCs continue to gain importance, the vendors will start to collaborate and pool their resources together to offer the quickest and most accurate way to detect compromises. Vendors will emerge to provide real-time collaboration around Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and threat intelligence platform vendors will drive collaboration across the industry to share IOCs.

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