Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Cloud Security Trends for 2023

By Meny Har, CEO and co-founder of Opus Security

Leveraging the cloud and its benefits has become a necessity for organizations of all sizes that place business efficiency, streamlined processes, and operational ease at the top of their list of priorities. That said, the ubiquity of cloud security tools and solutions in the past several years demonstrates the significant security concerns that the sprawl of data and business assets in the cloud has created. Cloud Security continues to be the fastest-growing security sector, and we are seeing more and more deployments and variations of cloud security tools and platforms, as well as a growing number of attacks exploiting the weaknesses in this environment.

As the CEO and co-founder of Opus Security, a Cloud Security Orchestration and Remediation company striving to reduce risk while maximizing remediation, I believe that alongside the significant strides we've taken as an industry with regard to Cloud Security, there are still critical elements of this exciting space that are ripe for innovation. These are my 2023 Cloud Security predictions:

Cloud response and remediation will span across organizations

For malicious actors, there are no boundaries. They will target any opening, misconfiguration, vulnerability or blind spot in order to attack the organization in a swift, lateral movement. As cloud use proliferates through every department, team and business unit within organizations, so grows the number of cloud assets and risks originating from these various stakeholders. As this continues over time, security teams will have even less visibility and context into what is taking place across the company's attack surface, leading to heightened risk and slower response times. In the next few years, we anticipate that a growing number of teams and stakeholders within organizations will become active and crucial parts of cloud response and remediation processes. This will, in turn, drive responsibility and accountability in these teams as they become part of the day-to-day operational response and remediation mechanism.

Businesses will aim to reduce inter-organizational friction

As remediation will inevitably involve actors outside of the security teams, including a need for input and action in many cases, organizations will need to focus on improving their communication and collaboration mechanisms. Today, friction and inefficient workflow processes distributed between SecOps, DevOps and IT teams make it difficult for security teams to effectively remediate risk. Since we are all aware that in the modern business environment, security risks = business risks, C-suite decision-makers can no longer afford to manage their various teams in silos, detached and distributed without connecting tissue. The need for visibility and transparency across these teams and throughout the entire organization will grow.

A growing need for Cloud Security Orchestration and Automation

Cloud SecOps professionals are few and far between and must undertake their routine tasks along with management of the flood of alerts, notifications and issues that inundate their teams due to the visibility provided by CSPM solutions. While imperative for improving the security baseline in organizations, new cloud security tools also create a growing volume of noise and information that existing manual spreadsheets and legacy solutions simply cannot resolve at scale. The continued use of these solutions creates a concerning lag time between the detection and remediation of threats - as risk continues to grow. Looking ahead, we anticipate that security orchestration and remediation will shift its focus towards cloud security issues in order to help these professionals implement automated guard rails, resolve ownership and business context, track down root causes, and orchestrate a more effective remediation across the entire attack surface, be it through Infrastructure as Code (IAC) or the cloud itself.

As cloud security matures, its ability to both secure data and assets in the cloud as well as improve business continuity and efficiency will make it an essential - if not the most essential - priority in an organization's security stack. Cloud automation, zero-trust architecture, data-centric controls, cloud-native tools and identity management will all have an immense impact on reducing risk in the cloud and enabling both security and business leaders to leverage its benefits.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meny Har is the CEO and co-founder of Opus Security. In his previous position, he was the first employee and VP Product at Siemplify, from its inception and until its eventual acquisition by Google. Meny's past professional experience includes various security leadership and development roles, following his introduction to cybersecurity during his service in an elite intelligence unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, as a Department Head of Operations.