SECURING YOUR CLOUD ENVIRONMENT: SIX CRITICAL USE CASES TO CONSIDER

September 5, 2017 | Security and Risk | Amy Burnis

Migration to the cloud continues to accelerate as organizations increasingly take advantage of its many benefits—from efficiency and flexibility to competitive advantage and strategic value. In fact, 74 percent of chief financial officers at technology companies say cloud computing will have the most measurable impact on their business this year.

Here are some industry stats and predictions around this movement:

• Cloud computing spending is growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009 and is expected to grow at better than 6 times the rate of IT spending from 2015 through 2020. (Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by Salesforce, The Salesforce Economy: Enabling 1.9 Million New Jobs and $389 Billion in New Revenue Over the Next Five Years , September 2016)
• Worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18 percent in 2017 to $246.8B, up from $209.2B in 2016. (Source: Gartner1)
• By the end of next year, spending on IT-as-a-Service will be $547B. (Source: Deloitte)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) adoption is predicted to be the fastest-growing sector of cloud platforms, growing from 32 percent adoption in 2017 to 56 percent by 2020. (Source: KPMG )
• Microsoft Azure adoption increased from 26 percent in 2016 to 43 in 2017, while AWS adoption increased from 56 percent to 59 percent.(Source: RightScale)

The business benefits of the cloud are very real, but so are the vulnerabilities that exist within cloud workloads such as unprotected privileged accounts, credentials and secrets. That’s why security must play an integral role in any cloud strategy and be viewed as a shared responsibility between public cloud vendors and their customers. This is particularly important as more organizations leverage cloud to save on costs, access on-demand compute and turn to DevOps processes to increase their business agility.

While each organization’s cloud journey is different, there are a number of best practices that will likely need to be addressed to help ensure cloud workloads and infrastructures are secure. Our just-released eBook, 6 Key Use Cases for Securing Your Organization’s Cloud Workloads, outlines several important approaches organizations should take to secure their cloud workloads. The use cases are based upon our experiences of working with customers in the field.  Download it for free and visit cyberark.com/cloud for more information about how CyberArk can help your organization secure its cloud environments.

1 Gartner Press Release, Gartner Says Worldwide Public Cloud Services Market to Grow 18 Percent in 2017, February 2017, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3616417