Global spending on cloud security is set to grow nearly 18% to reach $12.7bn by 2023, with protection for public cloud deployments prioritized over the coming years, according to a new report from Forrester.
Organizations spent $178bn on public cloud services last year, a figure that will grow to $236bn by 2020 — making security increasingly important to protect mission critical systems and sensitive data.
Infrastructure decision makers are particularly concerned about cyber risk, with over half (54%) implementing cloud solutions, the analyst claimed in its report, Forrester Analytics: Cloud Security Solutions Forecast, 2018 To 2023 (Global).
The sheer complexity of cloud deployments, often covering multiple providers and hybrid deployments, also requires enhanced security to monitor data, detect anomalies, and intercept threats.
Public cloud remains the biggest focus for security investment. Some $4bn was spent on public cloud native platform security in 2018, accounting for over 70% of total cloud security spend and this will be the fastest-growth area to 2023, when it will reach $9.7bn, Forrester claimed
The good news is that these efforts appear to be working: just 12% of breaches targeted public cloud environments, while 37% of global infrastructure decision makers cited improved security as an important reason to move to the public cloud, according to Forrester.
The analyst was also keen to point out that there’s no single solution which can meet all an organization’s cloud security needs.
As mentioned, public cloud native solutions are growing fastest. These cover areas like: data classification, categorization and segmentation; server access control; user IAM; encryption; and logging, auditing, and anomaly detection.
Then there are cloud workload solutions designed to centralize and automate cloud security across multiple platforms and environments. This market is set to grow at 17.3% CAGR to reach $1.9bn by 2023.
Finally, cloud security gateways succeed where traditional security tools fail by encrypting data before it’s sent to SaaS applications; detecting shadow IT; data loss prevention (DLP); malware detection; and cloud access anomaly detection.