As Hybrid Cloud and Serverless Continue to Gain Ground, Organizations Rush to Keep Up; Fewer than Half Have Dedicated Cloud Security Teams
TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alcide, provider of the most comprehensive full-stack cloud-native security platform, today released the findings of a new industry report: 2018 Report: The State of Securing Cloud Workload based on responses from close to 350 security, DevOps and IT leaders. The report reveals that as more organizations embrace hybrid cloud - with more than 50 percent claiming a hybrid cloud setup - and serverless, now used by close to third of organizations, they lack the tools and specialization to keep up. 75 percent of respondents expect to see an increase in the number of security tools they rely on in the next year, while over half share they still manually configure security policies. The resulting complexity has the potential to slow critical business functions in the absence of an integrated security approach to distributed cloud environments.
In his September 2018 Market Insight report, 451 Research senior analyst Fernando Montenegro wrote that "the pace of innovation on cloud-native environments places significant burden on traditional security practices. Not only is there a need to support new technology options – quickly moving from traditional virtual machines to containers, serverless, and newer constructs such as service mesh – but there is also a difference in how security and DevOps teams consider their needs and workflows."
Alcide’s report, conducted in August 2018 in conjunction with Informa Engage, reinforces the idea that new practices and technologies are disrupting traditional security practices, with findings including:
Cloud complexity increasing, with hybrid cloud as the new infrastructure normal:
- While virtual machines (VMs) remain the most common cloud computing environment (83%), containers (37%), serverless (28%), and service mesh (21%) are gaining traction.
- Hybrid and multi-cloud approaches now make up more than three-quarters of all configurations (77%).
Serverless running in production; most bullish about its security
- Despite some security concerns, the majority (57%) of serverless users are currently running it in both production and development.
- The majority currently using serverless have a high degree of confidence in its security, while one third (32%) express a lack of confidence in the security of their environments.
As cloud infrastructure complexity grows, security becomes a shared responsibility with DevOps
- Fewer than half of organizations (45%) now have a dedicated security team responsible for the cloud, with 35% of all organizations now using either a DevOps team or dedicated DevSecOps team for security.
Hybrid cloud complexity pushes Dev, Sec and Ops teams to look for more tools to secure their distributed environments
- Over two-thirds (75%) expect to increase the number of tools in use over the next twelve months - with no one expecting to retire any tools in use
- One-third of organizations reporting using more than five tools for cloud security
Proliferation of cloud security tools leave the enterprise vulnerable, point to need for intelligent policy automation
- More than half (60%) of organizations rely on manual configurations of security policies for their apps, while almost all organizations (90%) rely on multiple individuals to configure and set policy rules.
“Our report validates what we’ve seen with our own customers - modern organizations are striving for a consolidated security approach that will support business velocity and tackle the challenges associated with the overhead of multiple tools in use,” said Karine Regev, VP Marketing of Alcide. “Modern teams can’t assume that emerging technologies like serverless are secure, and need a practical and uniform enforcement and management of security policies to control disparate and cloud-native services, infrastructure and environments.”
Access the full report here for additional insight.
About Alcide:
Alcide’s Cloud Native Security Platform protects any combination of container, serverless, VM and bare metal. Offering real-time, aerial visibility, threat protection and security policies enforcement, Alcide secures the cloud infrastructure, workloads and service mesh against cyber-attacks, including malicious internal activity, lateral movement and data exfiltration. For more information, please visit www.alcide.io