Multi-Cloud Security in 2022
As we kick off 2022, it is a good time to think about what the next year will mean for the security industry. This next year is a critical time for our market. Over this past year, organizations of all types have increased their focus on cloud security. Still, there’s a long way to go, as a recent survey of IT leaders showed. Could 2022 be the pivotal year organizations transition to cloud-first and multi-cloud? We think so—and that shift will enable a host of other trends.
Organizations hit a Multi-Cloud Tipping Point
According to recent research, the upcoming year will see multi-cloud become the de facto standard in nearly every organization. Ninety-five percent of organizations surveyed said they are making multi-cloud a strategic priority next year. That’s the good news. The bad news: Those same organizations said they were underfunded, underinvested and underskilled at multi-cloud. And, of course, security is their top concern.
Fortunately, 2022 also appears to be the year that IT leaders get serious about fixing this pressing issue. Security within their multi-cloud strategy is a top priority for 96% of IT leaders. And, on average, they said they are increasing their multi-cloud security budgets by a whopping 47%.
Cloud-Native Security Solutions take Root
2022 also will be the beginning of the end for agents—and their close cousins virtual appliances—in the cloud. We repeatedly hear from customers that they despise system-level security agents in the cloud and that network security virtual appliances are meant for data centers (or maybe kitchens).
Agents have been the bane of IT operations teams’ existence for years. There are many reasons to despise agents: Performance degradation, kernel-level conflicts, agent updates, version control, deployment, health and the potential for supply chain attacks. But we accepted them and, until now, there wasn’t another way. However, the cloud is different. The cloud has variable application architectures, services and ephemeral workloads. You simply can’t achieve comprehensive security policy, visibility or defense with a security agent in a dynamic cloud.
The cloud also opens up new opportunities for a world without system-level security agents or network security appliances to manage. With 89% of IT leaders seeing cloud security as different from on-premises security, solutions that use cloud-native constructs for visibility, workload identification and inline prevention—all without the need for agents—are a natural fit. Especially given the added requirement for multi-cloud, 2022 is undoubtedly the year that cloud-native takes root.
Cloud Security Teams Automate Remediation and Prevention
2020 and 2021 were pivotal years in cloud security, with many visibility and compliance players entering the market. The focus on gaining cloud visibility was a significant step forward. After all, the mantra, “You can’t secure what you can’t see” is at least as true as the statement that it was adapted from: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
However, visibility and compliance are simply a stop on the journey, not the destination. The goal is clear—it’s the security of the cloud, not just compliance. And through observability and telemetry technologies like Terraform and cloud-native constructs like tags, security in the cloud has the opportunity to achieve something we could never do in the data center—enabling full automation of policy and controls. Now that cloud teams have honed their focus on visibility, it’s only natural that the next two years will be about taking back control and evolving the cloud security operating model toward this potential. Powered by infrastructure-as-code (IaC), the automation of security controls for threat prevention, anti-exfiltration and identity-based segmentation will become mainstream in 2022.
Ransomware Finds a new Home: Public Clouds
To say that ransomware has been the talk of the last few years in the security space would be an understatement. And predicting that ransomware will continue to impact organizations in a big way in 2022 would be way too obvious. The new wrinkle for ransomware in 2022 is not just that it will continue, but that it will find a new home: Public clouds.
Why? It’s simple. These days, attackers have one primary motivation—profit. The U.S. Treasury traced over $5 billion in bitcoin ransomware payments in 2021. Where is the next source of profit for attackers? The answer: Workloads and systems running in public cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP. Attackers have an added advantage in the cloud, too. Instead of a layered defense in the data center that often has been bolstered against ransomware, cloud defenses are often impacted by a shared responsibility model that leads to gray areas that go unprotected. Ransomware has also advanced beyond just end-user-centric phishing as the primary attack point. In the cloud, single layers of security often provide the unlocked doors and windows that attackers need—a lesson we’re certainly seeing with the recent Log4j vulnerability.
After all, criminals go to where the money is. With spending on the public cloud now exceeding on-premises spend, we should all be aggressively preparing to secure this critical threat vector.
Industry Consolidation Accelerates
The platform-versus-point solution debate has been raging for years in technology communities. This coming year, more than ever, platforms will take a commanding lead for buyers in every space and especially within cloud security.
Why? Business agility demands it. When multi-cloud is top-of-mind and complexity is at an all-time high, IT leaders don’t need integration projects. They don’t have time for them and they are already understaffed. No matter how good a tool is, if there’s no one to operate it effectively or to integrate it into the workflow properly, it will never return value. This motivation means that IT buyers will lean heavily into platform purchases in 2022. The impact of this overall trend will push more significant industry consolidation as competing platforms look to win based on scope versus best-of-breed capabilities.
