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Data Management and Cloud Security Trends for 2024

By Peter Shafton, CTO, ngrok

2024 is all about data. How it's managed. How it's accessed. How it's secured. These problems aren't new - many companies have risen to success in the last decade trying to solve them. But as the volume of data continues to grow, so does the need to access, process, and store it in a secure and cost-effective way.

This will be especially important as the next generation of AI companies emerge that need to train their models on customer-held datasets. Transferring training data out of customer networks is a non-starter because it risks data security and data sovereignty - not to mention it's expensive and slow. Instead, companies will run AI software in customer networks where the data lives. This is just one use case of dozens that requires vendors to get secure access to customer networks. Here's how they'll do it.

Organizations will take back control of their data

Companies today want easy access to and control of their data. While the past decade witnessed a rush toward cloud-based data solutions, the pendulum is swinging back toward self-management. The reasons behind this shift are twofold: privacy and cost-effectiveness. The constant threat of data breaches and the need for more stringent access control have made businesses wary of relying solely on external cloud platforms. Additionally, the unpredictability of cloud data storage and processing costs has led organizations to seek more predictable and cost-effective solutions. This trend is also facilitated by a proliferation of accessible and user-friendly data management tools, often originating from open-source solutions pioneered by tech giants like Uber, Netflix, and Airbnb.

Enterprises will ask for Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

As enterprises seek more cost-effective and flexible solutions for data management, we will see increased adoption of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). In a BYOC model, SaaS vendors handle the control plane, which includes user management, configurations, and policies, and the enterprise hosts the data plane, where the work actually occurs. Large enterprises will ask for BYOC from their SaaS vendors to optimize spend, reduce the back-and-forth of data transfer, and have greater control over their cloud environments to address data sovereignty concerns.

Cloud app security will get community collaboration

The days of naively setting up an application and immediately exposing it to the internet are gone. Startups, in particular, often underestimate the array of attack vectors and the tools required to safeguard their cloud applications and data effectively. Building robust defenses, such as rate limiting, concurrency control, and comprehensive visibility, is no simple task and often falls between the cracks of cloud service providers' offerings. In 2024, we'll see more enterprises come together as a community to address this challenge. Collaborative efforts will grow as businesses realize the complexity of protecting their cloud applications and data and the lack of readily available solutions from cloud providers.

While we've seen the masses manage their own data before, it hasn't been at this scale or complexity. This shift will create opportunities for specialized vendors to solve a new set of problems in data management and cloud security. The question is, will they be the same data leaders who saw the industry through the migration to the cloud? Or will they be new innovators who challenge that status quo?

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