Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Amit Gupta, VP of Product Management, CloudPassage

Looking ahead to obstacles and improvements for cloud migration and security

As businesses continue to adopt both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud platforms, Security and risk pros struggle to protect their organization's valuable data while minimizing the threat surface of cloud and hybrid cloud workloads.

Cloud workload security (CWS) solutions provide automated and layered controls to secure configurations, networks, applications, and storage of hybrid cloud hypervisors and workloads. These solutions will be crucial for success in 2018 and beyond, but what else can we expect from the future of cloud security?

Containers will reach the mainstream and become the preferred form factor for greenfield applications.

Container adoption saw a growth explosion in 2017, and the app development benefits have become apparent to all. Any security practitioner defining their security roadmap and not accounting for a comprehensive plan for container security is building a flawed, incomplete approach.

Migration of enterprise apps to public cloud will accelerate

Public cloud has matured significantly. Friction points have been addressed and there are now mature solutions available on the market. As a result, the migration of enterprise apps to public cloud will accelerate in 2018, as more CIOs and CISOs are ready to move their infrastructure to the cloud.

As enterprises continue to adopt public cloud solutions, they'll develop diversified cloud policies. Multi-cloud will be a key design requirement for CIOs and CISOs. Unified security standards will be paramount, as few enterprises will want separate security solutions across clouds.

2018 will be a year of carnage for point security solutions

Though point solution approaches have worked in the past, security practitioners now have to support a multitude of platforms. Enterprises will look for comprehensive security solutions across multi-cloud environments in an attempt to future-proof their security. Point security solutions have reached the end of their usefulness.

Enterprises will continue to look for every conceivable advantage when it comes to securing their data. The ability to continuously monitor, inspect, and validate the security and compliance posture of all enterprise servers, containers, and applications-automatically and at scale-will be crucial to their success.

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Amit Gupta's career spans 19 years building software products and services across various domains including application hosting, public, private cloud infrastructures. At CloudPassage, he is a hands-on product executive leading definition and delivery of all product offerings. He is also responsible for evangelizing CloudPassage's product strategy and vision with clients, partners and industry leaders.