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Cloud Sprawl Keeps Snowballing

With cloud deployments proving their value and then some, enterprises are tripping over themselves to increase the penetration of cloud across their entire organizations. Whereas four years ago just 27% of cloud users were running applications, that's now risen to 49%, according to ESG Research. And by next year, analysts believe some 83% of all enterprise workloads will run in the cloud — with about half of those in public clouds, another quarter in private clouds, and the final fourth in hybrid.

Amid all that growth, cloud deployments sprawl both more broadly across organizations and deeper into systems that were once firmly on-prem. And the variety of deployments can be dizzying. According to the Cloud Security Alliance, 66% of organizations have a multicloud environment.

"People aren't in the cloud anymore," Sonrai Security's Hannigan says. "They're in hundreds of clouds."

This is posing some big security management upheaval for those who rely on monitoring and controls that don't translate well between different on-prem and cloud environments.

"From a CISO perspective, it becomes increasingly important to have solutions that can natively support and provide real coverage across all the different environments," says Zane Lackey, CSO and co-founder of Signal Sciences. "This way, you avoid a management headache of having one vendor for data center apps, another for hybrid cloud apps, and yet another for pure public cloud apps."

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