In 2022, AWS (Amazon Web Services) remains one of the dominant cloud platforms and continues to be recognized as a leader in Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. AWS accounts for 34% of the cloud infrastructure service providers, so many organizations today have either all, most, or at least some of their infrastructure on AWS.
Since March 2020, cloud adoption has accelerated at an unprecedented rate and across every industry. With the pandemic ushering in the work-from-home era, the ability of organizations to collaborate remotely has become paramount, placing a higher-than-ever premium on cloud technology.
The adoption of cloud software in organizations continues to grow. In 2020, the combined end-user spending on cloud services totaled $270 billion, according to Gartner. By 2022, projections indicate that this total will rise to a staggering $397.5 billion. In fact, according to Arcserve, there will be over 100 zettabytes of data stored in the cloud by 2025. To give you some perspective, a zettabyte is equivalent to a billion terabytes. But are cloud services superior to an on-premises solution?
As enterprises move their applications to the cloud, they’re adopting finer-grained authorization for their users in order to better secure architectures and applications. Today, many, if not most, organizations use a role-based access control (RBAC) model for secure access. But as the push for fine-grained control grows, many organizations are asking: should we transition to attribute-based access control (ABAC)?
Despite the increase in cloud adoption, many organizations are still hesitant to move their confidential and highly sensitive data to the cloud. It’s not uncommon for companies to have concerns about being able to maintain the privacy, integrity, and security of their data when they migrate to the cloud or leverage cloud services. This is especially true for organizations that operate in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, and the public sector.
Architecturally speaking, cloud-native applications are broken down into smaller components that are highly dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral. Because each of these components is communicating with other components inside or outside the cluster, this architecture introduces new attack vectors that are difficult to protect against using a traditional perimeter-based approach.