Crowd Research Partners today released the 2018 Cloud Security Report revealing that security concerns are on the rise, exacerbated by a lack of qualified security staff and outdated security tools – while data breaches are at an all-time high.

Download the complete 2018 Cloud Security Report here.

"While workloads continue to move into the cloud, the study reveals that cloud security concerns are on the rise again, reversing a multi-year trend," said Holger Schulze, CEO of Cybersecurity Insiders and founder of the 400,000-member Information Security Community on LinkedIn which commissioned the study. "With half of organizations predicting a rise in cloud security budgets, protecting today’s cloud environments require more and better trained security professionals and innovative, cloud-native security solutions to address the concerns of unauthorized access, data and privacy loss, and compliance in the cloud."

Key takeaways from the report include:

Step One: Identify a Niche

Before you consider launching a business online, you need to identify where your business will fit in the industry, and you’ll need to find the right products to fill a gap in the market and complement your branding. To do so, research the different niches in your industry and aim to identify potential problem areas so you can find the best solution for your customers.

SonicWall, the trusted security partner protecting more than 1 million networks worldwide, announces the company’s new managed security service provider (MSSP) program. The SonicWall SecureFirst MSSP Program helps partners with new or mature managed security practices fill their customers’ widening security skills gap by building and scaling their managed security service offerings to deliver optimal security outcomes.

"The swift rise and sophistication of data breaches and network threats is forcing well-intentioned organizations to outsource network and data protection to MSSPs," said SonicWall Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Steve Pataky. "This opens many opportunities for SecureFirst Partners to deliver or resell expert 24/7 managed security services – backed by SonicWall’s automated real-time breach detection and prevention – to provide ongoing protection from cyber attacks. This means incredible growth for our SecureFirst partners, so we want to accelerate their managed security services in every way possible."

Avi Networks, the next-gen application delivery platform, launched new features today that make it easy for enterprises to automate the deployment and scaling of applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Enhancements to Avi’s integration with datacenter management platforms, Ansible and Terraform, paired with Avi’s machine learning capabilities let IT teams provision infrastructure resources and application services without the need to code complex logic. This solution can be deployed across the largest cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as private data centers.

Until now, enterprises had to manually configure applications and use custom scripts to provision resources within their environments. The architectural innovations in Avi’s platform remove this hurdle to deliver best-in-class automation, elasticity, and self-service. As demand increases for an application, Avi can automatically spin up additional servers, cloud infrastructure, network resources, and application services for the application.

Creating environments for data to thrive, Western Digital Corporation today announced that it is relieving big data pressures on IT managers by offering enterprises a cost-effective and scalable backup and recovery solution for on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. Two powerful technologies, ActiveScale object storage system and StorReduce deduplication software, provide petabyte-scale storage that protects data efficiently, and facilitates a data forever architecture, saving companies up to 70% compared to traditional backup appliances. With this modern approach, protected data is stored in an open format so customers can analyze and extract hidden value from the data to help transform businesses or achieve new breakthroughs faster.

There’s no doubt that data is growing rapidly. This is putting multiple pressures on IT managers to optimize budgets and resources, reduce backup and restore times, design for regulatory and security mandates, and more efficiently balance workloads and applications on-premises and in the cloud. Today, traditional backup methods such as expensive backup appliances, or magnetic tape for long-term retention, are rendering themselves ineffective due to the volume, velocity and variety of data.

Likewise, an increasing number of businesses are migrating their data systems from hardware to these providers. No matter what industry you are a part of, whether it’s a unique graphic design firm or a large manufacturing operation, the cloud is here to stay and getting on board now will save you time, money and resources. So, what are the ways you can use it to the best of your ability? Below are three ways.

"There’s no denying that AI is the future of every industry, but today’s complex cloud ecosystem coupled with a massive skills gap are threatening innovation," said Daniel Kobran, co-founder of Paperspace. "You shouldn’t need decades of experience to build intelligent applications. We designed Gradient to remove infrastructure bottlenecks so that any developer can build a production-ready cloud AI pipeline."

Gradient is a suite of enterprise-ready tools that makes developing cloud AI as simple as building a modern web service. Featuring one-click Jupyter notebooks, a powerful GPU job runner and a new integration that lets you add 1-line of code to run any code on a full GPU cloud, Gradient works to turn raw infrastructure into the building blocks for intelligent applications. The mission behind Gradient is to accelerate the development of new machine learning products and services across a host of industry verticals.

Secura announced a partnership with workload security specialist, HyTrust, to offer HyTrust DataControl virtual machine level encryption to customers as a service on flexible, monthly terms.

Fully managed by Secura, HyTrust DataControl can be delivered as either a stand-alone solution or as part of Secura’s comprehensive Web Protect online security suite.

Many data encryption technologies will only encrypt on a platform level, or premium license editions of software would need to be purchased to access encryption, making them expensive options to implement, with lengthy minimum contract terms.

DataControl allows encryption at rest to be applied on a per virtual machine basis, so only those specific parts of a platform that hold sensitive or regulated data need to be encrypted, making it incredibly cost-effective for businesses to implement and protect their data.

PrimaryIO Hybrid Cloud Data Management technology is based on deep understanding and profiling of the application behavior at a working set level to enable customers to rapidly move and burst workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS. This enables a range of use cases for customers to leverage the capacity and capabilities of the AWS cloud, while retaining their current storage investments for their persistent data.

Use The Best Software

If you’re office based, then you and your employees need to be using the very best technology you can afford. Business processes will be quicker and more efficient if you’re using modern services. If you’re using computer software that is out of date, then you’re going to have to work extremely hard to keep up and challenge other businesses. Avoid using old IT software and invest in improved communications such as cloud technology from Teldat, spyware, CRM and file recovery software. You cannot expect the best work from your team if you’re not giving them the best software to work with. Your business will start to suffer and slip if you’re not giving 100% into improving the essential apps, tools, and software so begin today and replace any old services you have.