Cloud Workload Protection Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The cloud workload protection market is expected to reach a CAGR of 24.2% during the forecast period (2021 - 2026). The growth of the market is attributed to the increasing cloud workload. According to Cisco Systems, the cloud workloads will be 94% of total data center workloads in 2021 compared to 86% in 2017. Factors such as the growing adoption of multi-cloud strategy among enterprises, the rising need to fortify enterprise workloads against unauthorized strikes, and centralized policy enforcement are expected to drive the growth of the market across the globe.

Key Highlights

• According to NTSC, the cloud industry is growing exponentially and is expected to rise from USD 227 Billion in 2019 to USD 354 Billion by 2022. Currently, more than 90% of enterprises use cloud service. The growing adoption of private and public cloud computing models has led to an increase in cyber attacks targeting resources and sensitive data residing within these platforms. While more organizations move to the cloud, the awareness regarding the security of data is driving the market growth.
• Moreover, unauthorized cloud access, insecure interfaces, misconfiguration of the cloud platform, and account hijacking are boosting the demand for the market. A misconfigured cloud environment is considered to be the leading cause of data theft incidents. For instance, in April 2019, unprotected Amazon servers exposed 540 million records of Facebook users through third-party apps.
• Enterprises need to secure cloud-based workloads, using a protection approach. Many vendors offer Cloud worload protection platform solutions that vary widely in their capabilities, as every cloud workload does not require similar protection. Some cloud workloads have less confidential data and require controls rarely, while others hosting sensitive data are likely to use more controls. Whereas, workload within the host may need less protection from due to the presence of network-based controls, such as intrusion protection systems (IPSs) and firewalls. The cloud workload protection platform enables encryption of both persistent data and data in motion for data assurance.
• With the outbreak of COVID-19, there is a significant impact on the market. According to McAfee's report, the use of cloud services increased by 50 percent between January and April in 2020. It also confirmed that the cybercriminals had been steadily working to exploit the increase in remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic with remote attacks on cloud services, which rose by 630%. Hence the market is likely to grow over the forecast period.

Key Market Trends

Hybrid Cloud Deployment to Drive the Market Growth

• The hybrid cloud deployment has experienced significant overall growth in the past few years compared to that of the other cloud services. It offers certain benefits like managing huge data and high processing speed that organizations need. Organizations are using hybrid cloud to scale computing resources and decrease the investment in managing high data processing demand.
• For instance, the Ohio state government has partnered with IBM to adopt a hybrid cloud to consolidate and modernize its departmental data centers into the state of Ohio Computing Center. The organization has mentioned housing thousands of applications with the same. With an ongoing effort to deliver citizen services faster and cheaper, the Singapore government will be shifting the bulk of its IT systems to commercial cloud services in the upcoming years. ​
• Hence, with the rising adoption of hybrid cloud across industries, there comes a dire need for a cloud workload protection platform. A hybrid cloud protection platform offers a reliable way for information security and helps manage policies and monitoring issues such as threats and intrusions. Moreover, these platforms support a wide variety of security and operations tasks, from breach detection and protection against ransomware.

North America to Hold Significant Market Share

• North America is anticipated to hold a significant share in the cloud workload protection market. The region is the home of top cloud providers such as Microsoft Corporation and Amazon Web Services, which are continuously innovating their cloud offerings and expanding their customer base. According to IBM, the business adoption of managed cloud infrastructure services is likely to reach 68% in 2020 compared to 34% in 2018 in the United States.
• Organizations in the region are moving beyond the public cloud and are stepping into a new era of hybrid IT that combines public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT. These organizations are implementing a hybrid cloud strategy to aid them in improving their business and delivering services to customers, hence creating demand for the market.
• Vendors are also encouraging the hybrid model in several ways. For instance, VMware Inc. and IBM announced new offerings to accelerate enterprise hybrid cloud adoption. The offerings include a new IBM service offering to help migrate and extend mission-critical VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud, and new integrations to help enterprises modernize applications with Kubernetes and containers. ​
• Moreover, the significant factors driving the growth for this region are the growing adoption of cloud services, the ever-increasing need to prevent cyber threats, better security compliant offerings by vendors such as CloudPassage, HyTrust, etc., and rising need for enhanced control and visibility mechanisms.

Competitive Landscape

The cloud workload protection market is highly competitive, owing to the several players in the market. Players are continuously working on providing better protection solutions to the customers. They are also engaged in strategic collaborations, mergers, and acquisitions, etc., to increase their market share. Some of the key development in the market are:

• In June 2020 - Guardicore, a company in the data center and cloud security, announced the launch of the Botnet Encyclopedia. The Botnet Encyclopedia by the Guardicore Global Sensors Network (GGSN), a network of detection sensors deployed in data centers and cloud environments worldwide, can capture and record complete attack flows to the highest resolution. The Botnet Encyclopedia can allow IT teams, security teams, researchers, and the cybersecurity community to better understand and protect themselves from persistent and advanced threats, identified as campaigns.
• In June 2020 - CloudPassage, a cloud computing security and compliance company, announced new packaging and pricing options for its Halo cloud security platform. The new options give more companies the ability to put Halo’s proven capabilities to work in a broader range of deployment scenarios with even better economics.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support