All indications suggest organizations’ adoption of the cloud is going to ramp up considerably in the next few years. According to Cisco’s Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology (2016–2021) white paper, cloud data centers will process 94 percent of workloads and compute instances by 2021. Close to three-quarters of those resources will be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) assets processed in the public cloud.

Global digital security strategist Ian Trump thinks these trends suggest the world is moving away from on-premise and private cloud data centers. Trump believes those developments could profoundly change how businesses deliver their services and how security teams work to protect those services.

For that reason, he recommends companies seriously consider migrating to the cloud if they haven’t done so already:

“A great shakeout in the tech industry is coming. If your business can’t afford to move to public cloud SaaS from its existing systems, a scrappy cloud startup is going to take your lunch money on the playground. For those in the current security space, adapt to this SaaS trend or become irrelevant to business,” warns Trump.

Of course, organizations can’t just pick up and move all their IT resources to the cloud. They need to keep a few security concerns in mind if they decide to migrate. First and foremost, companies need to figure out what type of deployment model will work best for them.

“I’m an advocate of migrating to the cloud and the intrinsic of having improvements in security and compliance driven by multiple other clients, but this doesn’t mean you can set it and forget it,” explains Matthew Pascucci, Cyber Security Practice Manager at CCSI. “When migrating to the cloud, the deployment model is important to understand first. Will you be in a private, public, SaaS, or PaaS infrastructure? Understanding this will (Read more...)