Gartner has released its Hype Cycle for Cloud Security 2017 to help IT security professionals separate technologies that are ready for adoption now from the hype of those that may take many years to be ready for mainstream use.
Rapid growth in cloud adoption has made this year’s Hype Cycle of particular interest as organisations struggle to understand security issues in the cloud. It’s a double-edged sword, according to Jay Heiser, research vice president, Gartner.
“Security continues to be the most commonly cited reason for avoiding the use of public cloud. Yet paradoxically, the organisations already using the public cloud consider security to be one of the primary benefits,” said Heiser.
The Hype Cycle charts technologies along a maturity curve travelling through five stages of expectation from innovation and the peak of inflated expectations, through the lows of disillusionment to the slope of enlightenment and finally to the plateau of productivity.
In the innovation stage this year, and expected to mature within two to five years, are cloud infrastructure security posture assessment, container security, and security rating services. Also at this stage, but expected to take 5-10 years to mature, are immutable infrastructure, cloud data backup, digital security and open ID connect.
Technologies at the peak of inflated expectations this year include data loss protection for mobile devices, key management-as-a-service, and software defined perimeter. Gartner expects all of these technologies to take at least five years to hit the plateau of productivity.
In the trough of disillusionment stage this year are disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and private cloud computing, both of which Gartner predicts will achieve mainstream adoption in the next two years.
The slope of enlightenment is the stage at which new technologies are beginning to be adopted in an increasingly diverse range of organisations. This year data loss protection (DLP) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are both on the slope and expected by Gartner to mature within two years.
Gartner found four technologies to have reached the plateau of productivity: tokenisation, high assurance hypervisors, application security as a service, and identity-proofing services. Only the latter remains at the plateau stage from last year’s Hype Cycle, with the three others new to the stage this year.
“The Hype Cycle can help cyber-security professionals identify the most important new mechanisms to help their organisations make controlled, compliant and economical use of the public cloud,” said Heiser.