Is there still room in the cloud-security market?

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Kelley Mak Contributor

Kelley Mak is a principal at Work-Bench, where he focuses on early-stage enterprise technology investments in areas including security, cloud and developer tools.

While the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided for businesses, one of its main legacies is how it ushered in a tidal wave of accelerated digital transformation.

A recent Twilio survey revealed that 97% of global enterprise decision-makers believe the pandemic sped up their company’s digital transformation, and on top of that, 79% of the respondents said that COVID-19 increased the budget for digital transformation.

As technology becomes the driving force of competitive differentiation, cloud plays a key role in making this a reality and impacts everything from data and analytics to the modern workplace. Cloud-based infrastructure promises more flexibility, scale and cost-effectiveness, as well as enables enterprises to have more agile application development and keep up with service demand.

What’s clear is that despite shortfalls in security, innovation in cloud and infrastructure will charge ahead.

Even with all of the hype and excitement around cloud’s potential, it is still early days. In his recent keynote at AWS re:Invent, the AWS CEO Andy Jassy mentioned that spending on cloud computing is still only 4% of the overall IT market. And a Barclays CIO survey found that enterprises have 30% of their workloads running in the public cloud, with the expectation to increase to 39% in 2021.

It’s become clear that the movement to cloud has its barriers and that large enterprises are often skittish to make the jump. Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2020 report outlined some of these top cloud challenges, citing security as #1. This has been widely apparent in conversations that I’ve had with Fortune 500 CISOs and security teams, who are wary of the shift from their current state of security operations. Some of the major concerns brought up include:

• No longer your own master. When working with the public cloud providers, companies must relinquish control to some aspects of back-end management. This is tough for large enterprises who have a history of customizing products because you can’t completely tailor the environment to your liking and are limited to what’s on the cloud service provider’s platform.
• Lack of standardization. Each cloud provider has their own solutions and own intricacies. Add to that other pitfalls, like an unknown cadence of updates, there is an opaqueness to interoperability and policies can’t be uniformly applied across environments.
• Requires a new skill set. Lack of resources/expertise ranks among the top challenges for enterprises. A recent report on challenges in cloud transformation found that 86% of IT decision-makers believe shortage of talent will slow down 2020 cloud projects.
  
  

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