Gartner Releases the Hype Cycle for Cloud Security in 2017

Rapid growth in cloud adoption is driving increased interest in securing data, applications and workloads that now exist in a cloud computing environment. The Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security helps security professionals understand which technologies are ready for mainstream use, and which are still years away from productive deployments for most organizations.

"Security continues to be the most commonly cited reason for avoiding the use of public cloud," said Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner. "Yet paradoxically, the organizations already using the public cloud consider security to be one of the primary benefits." The attack resistance of the majority of cloud service providers has not proven to be a major weakness so far, but customers of these services may not know how to use them securely. "The Hype Cycle can help cybersecurity professionals identify the most important new mechanisms to help their organizations make controlled, compliant and economical use of the public cloud," added Heiser.

The peak of inflated expectations is a phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, where the hype is not matched by successful deployments in mainstream use. This year the technologies at the peak include data loss protection for mobile devices, key management as-a-service and software-defined perimeter. Gartner expects all of these technologies will take at least five years to reach productive mainstream adoption.

When a technology does not live up to the hype of the peak of inflated expectations, it becomes unfashionable and moves along the cycle to the trough of disillusionment. There are two technologies in this section that Gartner expects to achieve mainstream adoption in the next two years. Those are Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and Private cloud computing.

The slope of enlightenment is where experimentation and hard work with new technologies are beginning to pay off in an increasingly diverse range of organizations. There are currently two technologies on the slope that Gartner expects to fully mature within the next two years. Those are Data loss protection (DLP) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Four technologies have reached the plateau of productivity, meaning the real-world benefits of the technology have been demonstrated and accepted. Tokenization, high-assurance hypervisors and application security as a service have all moved up to the plateau, joining identity-proofing services which was the only entrant remaining from last year’s plateau.