Pictured: Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director, Dell’Oro

The future for cloud workload security solutions looks strong, according to a new report from independent analyst firm Dell’Oro Group.

Its Cloud Workload Security advanced research report details a robust appetite for solutions to secure cloud-based enterprise workloads across the entire application lifecycle, from development to deployment and runtime.

“The topic of how to secure workloads in the cloud is exploding as the number of enterprises leveraging the cloud and experiencing security issues increases,” said Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Application security in clouds is very different from traditional data centers, which is opening new solution opportunities and why we identified nearly 80 cloud workload security vendors.”

He added that as enterprises experienced a faster pace of business and a need to be more digital during the COVID pandemic, getting the correct data to the right stakeholder with speed, agility, efficiency, and scale has become a vital need. Consequently, this has led enterprises to embrace the cloud and refactor enterprise applications to gain greater speed, agility, and efficiencies than what the traditional on-premises approach offers. However, against the promises of the more modern, cloud-centric architecture is a new looming set of security challenges, such as cloud misconfiguration, software supply chain, inability to assert compliance, poor identity control of cloud assets, and lack of visibility, analytics, and automation.

“For the past decade, the security vendor community has been evolving and iterating a new class of security solutions we refer to as cloud workload security solutions that are tuned to the new cloud-based environment,” concluded Sanchez. “These solutions emphasize data and application security outcomes, deemphasizing classical perimeters and protecting IT infrastructure. Security is integrated at all levels and points in the application architecture.”