Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Vitaly Mzokov, Solution Business Lead, Data Center & Virtualization Security at Kaspersky Lab

Clouds on Fire, GDPR, Big IT's and Security

Clouds on fire. While cloud adoption is growing across all the industries and remains super-attractive for technology-driven businesses, there is also (unfortunately) an increasing interest in this area from cyber-criminals. Public clouds and managed hostings, are both the right tools to scale the corporate environment and forget about any limitations - you can keep focusing on doing business while new workloads show up almost immediately and travel with no borders across locations. However, the increasing number of data breaches that occur in cloud environments will cause a serious shift in how organizations look at clouds now via the prism of securing their corporate identity. With the majority of businesses having near-zero understanding of what and how to secure in their cloud environments, next year we will witness enterprises thinking more about compliance checks or auditing their cloud service providers, and both businesses and cloud providers will have to be prepared.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This European regulation will get more and more significant next year when companies finally understand that it is not just about Europe wanting to have regulations/compliancy. The GDPR is really a must to any organization - regardless of if they have offices in Europe - they may actually have end-users in the region. In 2018, upon the GDPR that will be effective May 25^th, we will see how the corporate world is able to adapt to the rapidly changing cybersecurity paradigm.

Big ITs to step into the security playground and strengthen cybersecurity alliances. We now see that big IT vendors finally consider the security market as one with a very large potential. Of course, cyber-criminals did their work and everyone now understand the importance of their own cyber-safety. This is now a good moment for Big IT to start new conversations with customers, as by establishing a rock-solid landscape for traditional growth, they are now building integrated environments based on philosophy of interoperability between IT and security layers. I predict that next year we will see more and more announcements about this. However, there are still gaps when it comes to protection of corporate workloads from advanced threats, and only mature security vendors can fill this gap by offering (and this is very important) products that interoperate with Big IT solutions via standardized APIs, while they still put less impact on systems performance. For such cybersecurity solutions providers like Kaspersky Lab, there are now even more opportunities to enhance these integrations by providing advanced levels of protection that leverage Machine Learning (ML) technologies and incorporate multiple years of constantly improving cybersecurity expertise.

For example, many of our customers have already increased their cyber-efficiency by using Kaspersky Security for Virtualization, which integrates with VMware NSX in agentless mode. This integrated solution provides advanced security orchestration capabilities based on policy-based operation and by tagging functionality that the VMware NSX platform offers, to help elastic clouds fight against cyberthreats.

##

About the Author