What Does Cloud Security Consolidation Mean for Enterprises?
While there are several security vendors available for businesses today, the driving force behind them is the never-ending need to innovate. The ultimate purpose is to safeguard organizations from ever-evolving cyber threats and attackers, pushing vendors to remain up to date with the trends as well as organizations to stay secure. This, in turn, brings a proliferation of solutions, leaving organizations to take a more fragmented approach to cyber security by incorporating different tools to solve every risk.
With this approach, organizations are simply trying to protect themselves against as many cyber threats as possible. While this approach seems straightforward, it forces organizations to maintain a surplus of tools that requires dedicated resources. And the time, resources, effort, and teams required to maintain them are simply unmanageable.
This is the reason why consolidation of security tools is so common. The network security space is undergoing a significant convergence with network security solutions assisting in separating good traffic from malicious ones. Today there is no longer the best breed of VPN as niche cyber security players are converging their operations into next-generation firewalls.
But what factors drove these organizations to converge?
Organizations are onboarding new vendors and tools every time a new technology is introduced, which is likely to burden them with the high cost of maintaining, supporting, and configuring the integrated tools. At the same time, new cyber threats are constantly emerging and evolving, compelling organizations to establish new frameworks to protect themselves and innovate quickly to establish a cyber defense.
Cloud business practices have been on the radar for many years, and current situations are being fueled by market consolidation among the top public cloud infrastructure providers, including Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. The top providers own nearly two-thirds of the global cloud infrastructure services market and three-quarters of spending on public cloud. Along with flagging competitive practices, organizations are integrating cloud practices to compete on their ability to provide secure storage for customer data.
A Gartner report predicted that by 2025, 80% of organizations would adopt a strategy to unify web, cloud services, and private applications that can be accessed from a single vendor’s security service edge (SSE) platform. With many security and risk management leaders continuing to face more demand for service, they are trying to navigate their path through the fast-changing threat landscapes as well as insufficient technical talent.
