Last year, cloud led digital transformation with tremendous adoption across enterprises. As we move forward, cloud environments will only become more predominant and integral to the success of businesses. Our team at Caveonix works to secure cloud workloads and support companies’ need to stay compliant using Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). Here are our predictions on how the cloud and compliance landscape will evolve.

In the coming months, cloud environments will evolve and we’ll see even more confluence of data between them drive innovation. Virtualization in the telco world and 5G (Edge Cloud) will enable the movement of data like we’ve never seen before, merging with private Cloud Core environments and Hosted, or Hyperscale Cloud environments. These environments take into account IoT and endpoints in a new way that will massively drive new innovation (think: autonomous cars), products and services that are not just restricted to typical hyperscale cloud. The energy industry is a great example: this industry is multinational by definition. These companies go where the oil is and they want to adopt cloud internally for flexibility and agility (Cloud Core), but they are also in an Edge Cloud scenario, with rigs all over the world with many IoT Endpoints. Through 5G, they will now be able to manage this global enterprise. The sheer business opportunities driven by the cloud in a software-defined world are exciting, but it is going to be imperative to keep an eye on reach-vs.-risk. If you are going to use the cloud, APIs and your data to slingshot directly into fields like IoT, mobile or other opportunities, the avenues you will open into new devices, or business partners, are going to require more oversight and control.

Compliance gets (even more) complicated. As enterprise cloud environments become more and more complex, they become more challenging to visualize and secure. We should expect regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, New York SHIELD Act and others, to require greater control and accountability measures that cloud providers and developers are not accustomed to providing by default. In addition to compliance regulations emerging in Europe and now the US, governments all over the world will start developing their own compliance regulations and rolling them out. This creates a challenge for global enterprises to stay in compliance, across all of their markets.

The good news: More cloud infrastructure and SaaS providers will answer the bell and roll out more compliance measures within their offerings. The bad news: Because most large organizations are multi-cloud, this means there will be massive feature creep across their associated cloud properties, instantly burdening administrators with even more configuration management and monitoring duties. Companies have to take a wide view and figure out the trade-offs between managing their different vendors’ emerging compliance and security tools, or investing in their own Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) program that can centralize and independently scale protection out across their various cloud footprints.