The growing impact of the cloud on cybersecurity

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The most proven catalyst for innovation in cybersecurity remains the many challenges of securing cloud infrastructure. The cloud has taken over the enterprise, dominating the technology stacks of large enterprises. The average business uses 1,427 cloud services, and the average business employee uses up to 36 cloud services, including collaboration and file sharing platforms.

By 2023, 70% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure, up from 40% in 2020. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are accelerating innovation, providing new insights into real-time threats and risks. CrowdStrike's rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning illustrate how endpoint security vendors are capitalizing on threat data to innovate quickly, for example.

The cloud's dominance over enterprise networks and technology stacks is fueling the largest and fastest growing IT market. Gartner predicts that global public cloud services will grow from $604.9 billion in 2023 to $1 trillion by 2026, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.24%. The fastest growing segments of public cloud services include database management, business intelligence, security, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Spending on public cloud security services is expected to grow from $19.4 billion in 2022 to $48.9 billion in 2026, reaching a CAGR of 20.3%. Today, 94% of businesses use cloud services and 75% say security is a top concern. 67% of companies have already standardized their cloud infrastructures.

As enterprises lift and move their workloads to the cloud, they face increased risks of breaches, accidentally misconfigured cloud platforms, and inconsistent coverage of access management to Identity (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) on hyperscalers and cloud platforms. Gartner predicts that at least 99% of cloud security failures will be user fault...