As a cloud architect, I am amazed that cloud security is still so hard. We’ve had identity access management (IAM) for more than a decade. Now we have deep encryption services, key management, and most recently, zero trust and secure access service edge (SASE). Note that zero trust and SASE are terms defined by Forrester Research and Gartner, respectively, and not by groups of security solutions providers.

Despite all this security technology, security solutions have become more complex and difficult to operate as cloud deployments themselves become more complex. As the technology and technology concepts (such as SASE) add more big ideas to the problem, the growth of cloud, Internet of Things, edge computing, and now work from anywhere quickly outpaces our ability to provide workable and cost-effective security. Our deployments become less secure rather than more.

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We live in a world where more and more of our personal information is held online. It’s often a single source of truth about us, the place where health information and financial records are stored and managed, used to make decisions about what we can and can’t do. Critical business records are stored online, finally replacing paper for contracts and for important transactions.

But how do we know that data is secure? There’s a certain trust in an encrypted hard drive sitting in a PC under your desk or even in your data center. But what about the cloud? So much of our compute and storage has migrated to services like Azure, either using cloud-native compute or lifted and shifted as virtual infrastructures. Now our data is just one tenant among many in a shared infrastructure where we have no control over how it’s stored and managed.

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We reached a big milestone in 2020: Cloud services revenue finally surpassed enterprise spending on data centers, according to the Synergy Research Group. One of the longest-running trends in IT – moving to the cloud – has been turbocharged, driven in part by a pandemic that pushed enterprises to avoid the logistical challenges and capital expense of deploying on prem.

But the endless capacity to add horsepower without provisioning your own infrastructure isn’t the biggest draw. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have become launchpads for the latest technology innovations, which developers can jump on to build innovative new applications. Machine learning libraries? Globally distributed databases? IoT platforms with all the bells and whistles? The big three clouds have ‘em all – ready, waiting, and API-accessible. It’s enough to make you wonder why you’d bother to build and maintain your own datacenter.

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In the latest Agents of Transformation report, Agents of Transformation 2021: The Rise of Full-Stack Observability, 77% of global technicians report experiencing a higher level of complexity as a result of accelerated cloud computing initiatives during the pandemic. A further 78% cited the need to manage the legacy and cloud technology patchwork as a further source of technology spread and complexity. (Note: The sponsor of this article sells an AIops/observability tool.)

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