Public Cloud Down Again? Predictions for 2021

By Prakash Sinha, Technology Executive and Evangelist at Radware

I thought we had heard the end of availability issues last year. However, this year Amazon AWS outage outdid everything we have seen before. Many services such as Roku, Vonage, Adobe, Washington Post, Flickr, Autodesk to name a few were impacted for 8+ hours. Service disruption often leads to poor customer experience, and attackers and hackers know that and use a broad set of techniques to cause harm. Will the move to the cloud slow down with this outage? In short, no. But organizations will be more willing to hedge against having all computing eggs in one vendor basket.

Here are my predictions for 2021:

1. Continued push to the cloud
• Organizations will now evaluate multi-vendor and multi-cloud options to hedge against outages at their many primary cloud providers.
• Revenue impacting business applications will be hosted across multiple providers and companies will require service level agreements and demand high availability solutions.
• The easy availability of sophisticated hacking tools and BOTs will force many to pay for keeping service denial attacks out of the corporate/virtual private networks.
• Organizations will be more willing to invest in education to address issues such as phishing and social engineering that play a large part in human failures.
2. More remote workers
• There will be further investments in solutions to enhance the remote user experience by incorporating caching, compression, WAN, and front end optimizations.
• We will move toward a zero-trust environment to ensure that the applications are accessed by the right users that are authorized and authentic.
• There will be a further deployment of multi-factor authentication, single-sign-on, client authentication, removal of unsafe ciphers, and moving to TLS 1.3.
• We will see investments to keep service denial attacks out of the corporate/virtual private networks.
3. Scraping and BOT attacks on applications will continue to increase
• Organizations will evaluate and invest in better security mitigation technologies including BOT protection, API security, application security, and data leak prevention technologies.
• We will see further investment in visibility and forensic tools in the cloud to gain actionable visibility for management, monitoring, auditing, compliance, forensics, and troubleshooting
4. Continued lack of multi-cloud networking and security expertise
• Lack of necessary human expertise will force more configuration automation to deploy corporate networking and security policies - now across multiple clouds.
• Improved automation and orchestration tools will emerge to help deploy application scalability, monitoring, security, optimization constructs across multiple clouds.
• Many MSPs will offer multi-cloud expertise to customers willing to pay someone else with the expertise
5. The cost of cloud deployments will again become a concern
• Now that the metered and pay-as-you pricing has delivered some pricing shocks for organizations that were forced to move to cloud-only deployment due to the pandemic, organizations will look to reduce the cost of computing and licensing.
• Elastic and flexible BYOL models across multi-cloud environments will gain favor with MSPs and large organizations.
• Costs of operating in the cloud will further increase as customers pay for both security and visibility, to compute workloads.
  

COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition timeline to the cloud for many organizations. However, the outages at many of the largest cloud service providers and recent hacking and ransom attacks highlight availability, scalability, and security challenges that must be addressed to keep both customer data and businesses safe and available.

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About the Author

Prakash Sinha, Technology Executive and Evangelist at Radware

Prakash Sinha is a technology executive and evangelist for Radware and brings over 30 years of experience in strategy, product management, product marketing and engineering. Prakash has been a part of executive teams of four software and network infrastructure startups, all of which were acquired. Before Radware, Prakash led product management for Citrix NetScaler and was instrumental in introducing multi-tenant and virtualized NetScaler product lines to market. Prior to Citrix, Prakash held leadership positions in architecture, engineering, and product management at leading technology companies such as Cisco, Informatica, and Tandem Computers. Prakash holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from BIT, Mesra and an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.