10 Cautious Steps to Boost Enterprise Cloud Security

As the world remembers 2020 for COVID pandemic, in the cyber world 2014 will long be remembered for a series of mega security breaches and attacks. Well known mega breaches in 2014 in the order of magnitude are:

• Target (40 million Credit and debit card details stolen)
• eBay (145 million people affected)
• JPMorgan Chase & Co. (76 million households and 7 million small businesses affected)
• Home Depot (56 million unique payment cards)
• CHS community Health Systems (4.5 million people affected)
• Michaels Stores (2.6 million people affected)
• Nieman Marcus (1.1 million people affected)
• Staples (point-of-sales systems at 115 of its more than 1,400 retail stores)
• Sony (Employees personal data and corporate correspondence)

Cloud computing in 2020 is more mature, going multi-cloud, and likely to become more focused on vertical and a sales ground war as the leading vendors battle for the market share. 

Picking the top cloud services provider is not easy given that the answer, much like enterprise software and IT in general boils down to "Hmm, it depends."

A few key trends are emerging for cloud computing in 2020, at a high level:

•  Move to remote work. Video conferencing and collaboration tools are accelerating moves to the cloud.
• Companies are well aware of vendor lock-in and want to abstract their applications, so they can fly across clouds. 
• The game is all about data acquisition. The more corporate data that resides in a cloud the stickier the customer is to the vendor. 
• AI, Analytics, IoT, and edge computing will be differentiators among the top cloud service providers, as well serverless and managed services.
• Public cloud spending has hit an inflection point where it has passed traditional IT infrastructure (In the second quarter of 2020). Spending including public and private cloud environments has increased 34.4% from a year ago. Non-cloud IT spending fell 8%.

• Software as a service(SaaS) is expected to be the largest revenue slice of the cloud pie. According to Gartner, SaaS revenue in 2020 is expected to be 166 billion USD compared to 61.3 billion USD for IaaS.