This post was originally published here by gregg rodriguez.
This is the first of a two part series on the benefits of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
Enterprises struggle to control costs and stay competitive – they face increasing demands to keep pace with requirements for data storage and protection, ever-changing regulations, and the daily threat of security breaches. To address these challenges, many IT and business professionals are increasingly looking to the power of IaaS, or cloud computing, for a number of reasons.
The IaaS market is predicted to reach $72.4 billion worldwide by 2020, according to Gartner, as cloud applications continue to be sought after and continue growing. Much of the growth is attributed to enterprises adopting digital business strategies, including IaaS, to pave the way for a transition from legacy IT systems to cloud-based services.
The pay-as-you-go model makes the virtualized computing services of public cloud extremely attractive, and what would seem the ideal solution, as organizations get greater control over IT costs, improved agility, network performance, and scalability. All that and more with on-demand computing resources that can greatly reduce capital expenses. Additionally, with this type of model, they can avoid the long-term contractual commitments historically required in traditional IT.
IaaS Challenging for Legacy Security
Those benefits are great – the bad news is, legacy security systems don’t scale to secure every endpoint and the expanding cloud attack surface to the degree required for security and compliance. Only 16% of organizations surveyed reported that the capabilities of traditional security tools are sufficient to manage security across the cloud, a 6 percentage point drop from the previous survey, with 84% saying traditional security solutions either don’t work at all in cloud environments or have very limited functionality.
While adoption of cloud computing continues to surge, security concerns are showing no signs of abating. Reversing a multi-year downward trend, nine out of ten cybersecurity professionals confirm they are concerned about cloud security, up 11 percentage points from the 2018 Cloud Report.
The top three cloud security challenges for 2018 included:
- Protecting against data loss and leakage (67%)
- Threats to data privacy (61%), and
- Breaches of confidentiality (53%).
In spite of these challenges – application owners, hoping to reap the benefits of the cloud, are driving security practitioners to figure out how they can enable them to harness the power of IaaS while still meeting security and compliance requirements. This is the fundamental challenge that CloudPassage can help you address.
Learn more about how Halo Cloud Secure can help you gain the critical comprehensive security and compliance visibility you need to effectively monitor and protect your IaaS environment. Download our product brief.
