The last year has accelerated the pace of digital modernization, as businesses looked to the cloud to re-shape their operations and enable greater agility against rapid change.

While nearly one-third of organizations cite the adoption of cloud services as “significantly more important” than before the pandemic, they are facing unprecedented challenges in how to modernize key infrastructure without increasing costs or critically, sacrificing security.

As part of our Designed for Change initiative, Oracle’s recent e-book discusses cloud security trends for 2021 and beyond, and how businesses are adapting against evolving threats.

Here are some of the highlights, read our top 5 cloud security trends ebook for how to stay ahead.

Trend 1: Zero Trust Approach

Remote work is increasing the need for a zero trust approach to security.

The decentralization of work and with the rapid adoption of cloud services require greater precautions against growing risks. Cybersecurity attacks have gone up by 47% while 70% of businesses are facing challenges with endpoint hygiene, in part due to the surge of remote work. With a zero trust approach, there’s no pre-defined level of trust ascribed to a user, workload, device, or network. This allows organizations to regulate access to systems, networks, and data without giving up control.

Trend 2: Increased Investment in Intelligent Security

AI and ML have become foundational requirements for cybersecurity technologies – beyond just malware.

The expansion of cloud services is driving new applications of AI and ML that stems beyond malware protection. Security automation, frequently offered in next-generation clouds, can reduce the time and resources needed to manually manage user access, while also decreasing human error. As the cybersecurity workforce shortage is projected to reach 1.8 million by 2022, AI and ML will become critical tools to prevent breaches and ensure business integrity.

Trend 3: The Secure Automation of DevOps

As DevOps becomes increasingly automated, 46% of organizations want DevSecOps to utilize security controls for continuous integration.

Businesses today are incorporating security automation into their production lifecycle to avoid inefficiencies and overhead, while also eliminating risky exposure. This strategy, often referred to as “DevSecOps”, automates cybersecurity processes, while controlling the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) toolchain that orchestrates the application lifecycle. It allows organizations to focus less on reacting to security incidents and more towards strengthening existing security posture.

Trend 4: CISOs are Wearing More Hats than Ever

CISO roles will demand greater cloud-centric expertise, as they become more engaged with digital transformation and business initiatives.

The pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital modernization, as companies seek cloud solutions to enable greater agility. As a result, chief information security officers (CISOs) are being increasingly tasked to support digital transformation (DX) and cloud computing initiatives, to ensure that cybersecurity is properly integrated into evolving business models and all aspects of IT—  including agile development, DevOps, and CI/CD pipelines.

Trend 5: Better Security Management Requires Higher Levels of Visibility

Organizations are investing in new tools to integrate the security stack across their cloud solutions, and enabling full visibility across all applications and infrastructure.

Cloud computing is expanding the technology stack for modern companies — posing new challenges in system visibility and maintenance. Because many large organizations work with multiple IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers—each with its own version of the shared responsibility model—businesses also become susceptible to misconfigurations, software vulnerabilities, human error, and process redundancy. Companies will need to anticipate the complexities that come with technology integration to ensure protection across their infrastructure, database, and applications.

The Oracle Difference

Oracle has decades of experience securing the data and applications of our customers, building trust and protecting their most valuable data. Protect your most valuable data in the cloud and on-premises with Oracle’s security-first approach.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Security provides security-first design principles that center on providing built-in security controls including isolated network virtualization and strict separation of duties. Keep your business protected using always-on encryption and continuous monitoring of user behavior with Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, further mitigating risk with our CASB Cloud Service and Identity Cloud Service. Customers can also leverage automated patching and threat mitigation to reduce complexity, prevent human error, and lower costs.

To get more details on these trends and prepare your organization to tackle your cloud security initiatives read the full e-book.

For further information view Oracle Cloud Infrastructure security, or try our cloud for free.