Cloud Security 2021 Trends

Cloud services is now a billion-dollar industry and it continues to grow more in the mere future. As per Gartner survey on public cloud revenue for 2020, it is been reported that there is a 17% of the year on year growth in cloud adoption across all industry verticals. Looking ahead to 2021 and beyond, cloud adoption in the enterprise are likely to surge and even government sectors are leaning on the cloud for operating their critical applications. In this context cloud security is also getting advanced, today most of the cloud service providers are providing robust security for their client workloads.

For most organizations, migrating to the cloud also means totally re-imagining and augmenting their stacks to accomplish a cloud-native implementation. This means that, in the coming years, some new security trends will likely take hold.

To ensure that your organization is prepared for the fast-evolving cloud-native future, the following are the four cloud security trends that IT staff and CISO’s should keep an eye on.

Cloud security consolidation will continue to build haze. 

By now most businesses realize the integral risk in using lots of security products to manage their cloud infrastructure. Even a small company may have 15-20 separate security tools being managed by their internal security team. But in the case of large scale organizations, it is often a tedious task to manage lots of security products separately.

Security staff are eager to find solutions that will deliver risk clarity for their cloud landscape. Cloud solution providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba provide native security features to their clients– but these promising offerings are usually insufficient and are often not well-integrated. Most of the companies make use of multiple cloud service providers in line with their private clouds or on-premises. This type of hybrid cloud model is where cloud service providers cannot provide end-to-end security.

Till 2020 cloud natives adoption was very few but from 2021 it is estimated that there will be a huge rise in the cloud-native security platforms (CNSPs). These platforms will allow security professionals to manage all the security parameters in public, private and hybrid clouds through a single console. These comprehensive platforms are integrated with siloed security solutions that possess capabilities such as threat detection and response, governance and compliance, data loss prevention, container security, and serverless security will all exist in a single platform. 

Machine learning (ML) for Security

Machine Learning has created quite a buzz in the technology landscape in recent years. Today ML is playing a significant role in solving many problems across various technology platforms. However, in practice, ML “solutions” have much more to offer.  Soon we will start to see ML implementations in some very specific use cases. We are yet to witness the extensive deployments of ML in areas like malware detection, data classification, and automated reasoning, which means ML can effectively estimate security configurations from all the possible angles that an attacker would intrude from. Identity and access management is one such example for ML implementation, automated reasoning is used to determine if policies are effective. 

Implementation of “ shift-left” by the increasing speed of DevOps

With the increasing speed of DevOps, security professionals now understand the strategic benefits of shift left, however, the adoption rate is very low till now. But shift-left will be the key module in cloud security premises as the adoption of cloud-native security platforms (CNSPs) will become more common.

What is shift-left security?

Shift-left in simpler terms is moving the security to the earliest stages of the development process.

Modern DevOps  CI/CD normally involves an eight-step process, in which security was included in the final stages of operations and monitoring. But this will change in the coming year’s security first is the primary agenda for the organizations. Shift-left will drastically reduce the cyber risk and also a cost-effective solution.

However, as cloud CNSPs become more common and security alliance progresses, there will be a more viable path to shift left for organizations security and DevOps teams. With these platforms, organizations will gain the ability to effortlessly integrate security parameters into the development pipeline, and this will guarantee cloud-agnostic protections across all the clouds.

Choosing Cloud Vendor with Broad Visibility

The multi-cloud strategy is being adopted in a wide range, but it creates visibility issues. As we step into New Year after a pandemic attack, security officials are in a hunt for new ways to gain high-end visibility as it was on an On-Premises environment. But visibility is very difficult in cases of highly dynamic cloud resources.

Security platforms that control cloud service provider APIs will offer a wide range of solutions for cloud-based workloads, including serverless and Platform as a Service (PaaS) and containers. Organizations must choose cloud vendors who can provide services focusing on cloud workload protection or data loss prevention.

Get ready for the future of cloud-native security – today

In this new era of cloud security, there this little doubt among organizations as to whether to shift their critical workloads to the cloud or let them be on their On-premises environment. In the fastest-changing security landscape organizations must rethink the way they build and manage their applications in the cloud. The accessibility and ease of use for cloud applications are empowering businesses to gain enormous value. In the age of cloud natives, security teams must ramp up their existing security parameters as per the changing cloud migration trends. CISOs are now focusing on rethinking their security strategies that can support multi-cloud environments.

At Locuz, we provide a layered security approach that addresses hybrid IT infrastructure as a whole & our security lifecycle services rest on three strong pillars – People, Processes, & Technologies. Together, these provide secure access for your business applications across all security-relevant data sources & coupled with intelligent analytics we can detect, investigate, & respond by overcoming silos. We design, deploy, and manage cyber security architecture and use our partner ecosystem to bring artificial intelligence-based analytics.