State of the market: Cloud security solutions protect data, applications, and infrastructure hosted in the cloud against cyberthreats. There is a broad spectrum of solutions in this cybersecurity category, but dedicated cloud security platforms typically combine access controls, encryption, vulnerability scanning, threat response, network security controls, and compliance monitoring.
- The global cloud security market was valued at USD 64.7 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.8% to reach a value of USD 156.5 billion by 2030. Within that, the cloud security softwaremarket is expected to reach a value of USD 45.7 billion by 2032.
- Growth is being driven by the global shift towards cloud computing for scalability, agility, and cost efficiency.
- As organizations adopt cloud services, they face a broader attack surface and increasingly stringent compliance mandates. Cloud security solutions can help solve both of these challenges.
- As a response to this, we’re seeing an increasing numbers of cybersecurity startups and partnerships between traditional IT providers and cloud service providers.
- The tech itself is also evolving; over the past year, cloud security solutions have seen rapid improvement and innovation in the threat detection and response space, where solutions are embracing recent developments in AI and machine learning to accurately identify and autonomously remediate threats.
Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading cloud security platforms, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their cloud security challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the cloud security space.
You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best cloud security products on the market in our Cloud Infrastructure Security Hub.
Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your cloud security implementation:
- For busy teams: Use your platform’s automation capabilities across threat hunting, remediation, and compliance to help reduce the management overhead for your security team.
- For easier management: If you’re a large organization, make sure you have a dedicated team available to respond to cloud security issues as—even with automations in place—cloud security platforms require a significant amount of managing. If you’re an SMB, you may want to consider investing in a managed cloud security solution, where the provider takes over some of the management aspects for you.
- For teams new to the cloud: Integrate security as early on in your cloud migration/adoption journey as possible. This will be much easier than trying to add security retrospectively.
- For complete coverage: Make sure you understand the Shared Responsibility Model by which your security provider operates. By understanding exactly which data you’re responsible for, you can make sure you’re taking steps to protect it.
How cloud security works: Cloud security solutions can be deployed in one of three ways:
- You can deploy software agents on cloud workloads (VMs, containers, and serverless functions).
- You can deploy it as-a-Service and integrate it with your environment via APIs—this is typically the most popular deployment method.
- You can use a hybrid combination of the two.
Once deployed, you integrate the solution with your cloud provider/s using APIs and Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.
You can then configure the solution’s workload, network, and identity security controls. This usually involves:
- Defining security baselines for VMs, containers, and serverless workloads.
- Setting up IAM roles and permissions to limit end user access to services they don’t need.
- Deploying network segmentation and firewalls to restrict unauthorized traffic.
- Enabling encryption to secure your data at rest and in transit.
- Setting up anomaly detection and behavior analytics so the solution can detect unusual activity.
- Configuring the solution’s incident response workflows.
- Configuring compliance and governance controls, which may include continuous compliance monitoring to align with standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO27001; automated compliance scans the detect misconfigurations and security gaps; and audit reports.
Once deployed and configured, cloud security solutions aggregate logs from your cloud workloads, APIs, and endpoints and monitor them for misconfigurations, excessive permissions, compliance drift, unauthorized data exfiltration, and anomalous or malicious behavior.
When they find a vulnerability, risk, or threat, they automatically respond to it. This could involve quarantining or blocking the threat, or, in the case of an identity-related threat, revoking a user’s access. In the event the solution can’t remediate the issue itself, it sends you an alert with all the context you need for your team to be able to handle it.
Benefits of cloud security: There are five main benefits to implementing a cloud security solution:
- Improve your incident detection and response.
- Cloud security platforms use anomaly detection and behavioral analysis to monitor your cloud environment in real-time for unusual activity that could indicate a security threat or breach.
- This is much quicker and more effective than having your security team comb through thousands of event logs searching for anything out of the ordinary.
- They can also automatically remediate certain threats, which enables a speedy response and frees up your team’s time and resource to focus on more complex issues.
- Secure your data against cyberthreats.
- Cloud security platforms offer a wide range of data protection and data loss prevention features, such as encryption, access controls, and backup and recovery.
- These preventative measures help protect your cloud data against cyberthreats, leaks, and unauthorized access.
- Achieve compliance with data protection standards.
- The best cloud security solutions offer compliance assessments, audit trails, and continuous compliance monitoring, which searches for compliance drift and non-compliant behaviors in your environment.
- This makes it easier for you to achieve—and prove—compliance with industry and federal data protection standards.
- Ensure business continuity.
- Employing cloud security practices minimizes downtime and enables faster recovery in the event of a security incident.
- Reduce costs.
- Because you don’t have to deal with any up-front hardware or ongoing maintenance costs, cloud security platforms can be cheaper to run in the long term than traditional, on-premises security tools.
Common cloud security challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing a cloud security solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:
- User permissions can be tricky to configure, particularly If your organization uses lots of cloud services that each need access controls or restrictions. We recommend mapping out each user’s/department’s responsibilities and assigning access according to their role.
- Cloud security platforms can be complex to implement and manage. We recommend looking for a platform that offers out-of-the-box integrations with as many of the cloud services and apps in your environment as possible, and which provides a centralized view of security across your entire cloud infrastructure.
- Cloud providers operate using a shared responsibility model, which can cause you to leave gaps in your security if you’re unaware of it. In this model, cloud providers are responsible for securing their infrastructure (e.g., data centers, network controls, applications, virtualization, and OS), but you are responsible for securing your data. Make sure you know exactly which elements of security you need to take responsibility for and implement tools and practices to cover each of them.
- “[When] everyone started going remote, people made a decision to move to the cloud right away, but there wasn’t enough education,” George Gerchow, Chief Security Officer and SVP of IT at Sumo Logic, told Expert Insights in an exclusive interview. “There was no understanding of the shared responsibility model when it came to Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers and Software-as-a-Service providers, and so a lot of things got lost in the mix. For example, a company suddenly moves to AWS and their data is being stored in S3, but what does that mean to me as a consumer? How do I encrypt that, client side, server side? And how do I monitor that?”
- In the cloud, it’s easy to become heavily dependent on a single cloud provider’s technology, which can limit flexibility and increase costs. To help avoid this “lock-in”, we recommend choosing a security platform that’s compatible with multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, supports open or vendor-neutral APIs and industry standards such as OAuth, SAML, and SCIM, and integrates easily with other third-party security and IT management tools.
Best cloud security providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers has put together a shortlist of the best providers of cloud security solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:
- The Top 10 Cloud Security Software
- The Top 10 Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) Software Solutions
- The Top 11 Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Solutions
- The Top 8 Cloud Encryption Solutions
- The Top 10 Cloud File Security Software
- The Top 10 Cloud Security Monitoring And Analytics Software
- The Top 10 Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions
Features checklist: When comparing cloud security solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:
- Access controls: You should be able to define granular, role-based authentication and access controls to help prevent unauthorized access to applications and data. As part of this, look for multi-factor authentication and single sign-on support.
- Network security: Your solution should offer network security controls to prevent unauthorized access to your cloud network. These might include segmentation, firewalls, and an intrusion prevention system.
- Encryption: Your solution should secure all your data at rest and in transit, and it should also provide key management, storage, and rotation.
- Continuous vulnerability scanning: The solution should scan your environment for known vulnerabilities such as out-of-date software and operating systems, and either automatically remediate them or alert your team so you can fix any issues before a threat actor can exploit them.
- Threat detection and response: The solution should use machine learning and behavioral analytics to identify any unusual activity that could indicate your environment has been compromised. Where possible, it should take steps to remediate the threat automatically (e.g., blocking/revoking a user’s access). If this isn’t possible, it should notify your team via a timely, contextual alert.
- Integrations: Your solution should integrate seamlessly with the cloud services and other third-party security tools you’re currently using.
- Compliance support: You should be able to configure compliance controls to help you to align with industry and federal standards like GDPR, HIPAA, NIST, CCPA, and ISO27001. The level of compliance support available will differ between platforms, but typically they should offer continuous compliance monitoring and audit reporting.
- Backup: Some cloud security platforms offer in-built backup and recovery functionality to help secure your data against accidental or malicious deletion or corruption. To work out whether the functionality on offer is enough to support your organization, check out our cloud backup guide here.
Future trends: Cloud security providers are continuously embracing new advancements in technology to improve the speed, accuracy, and effectiveness of their solutions. As the market continues to grow, we expect to see this continue in two key areas.
First, while many cloud security platforms are already using AI and ML to identify and automatically respond to threats, we expect the use of predictive AI to become more commonplace.
- Predictive AI will enable security platforms to identify potential future risks based on historical behavior patterns, enabling them to eliminate threats before they have a chance to manifest.
Second—and less immediately—as quantum computing enters the cloud space, we expect cloud security platforms to begin integrating these technologies.
- Quantum computing will likely enable cloud security platforms to provide more powerful encryption and carry out more advanced security analysis to identify vulnerabilities more quickly and accurately.
- This space is still very new. A few leading technology and cybersecurity providers, such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft, are already offering quantum services, but we expect more cloud service providers to integrate this technology in the future.
Further reading: You can find all our articles on cloud security in our Cloud Infrastructure Security Hub.
Want to jump straight in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy:
- Shortlist: The Top 10 Cloud Security Software
- Interview: Bob West On “Shift Left” Security, The Challenges Of Cloud Migration, And How Palo Alto Networks Is Supporting Security Consolidation
- Interview: George Gerchow On How Harnessing The Cloud And Cross-Training Employees Can Improve Your Security And Operations Processes
- Blog: Cloud Computing: What Are Cloud Environments, And How Do Cloud Services Work?
