Public clouds are changing the way businesses around the world operate. As the driver of a new round of post-pandemic digital transformation, Gartner expects the market to grow nearly 22% to $597 billion in 2023.
The agility, cost efficiency, and scalability offered by the public cloud make it an obvious choice for many organizations.
However, these benefits also come at a price. Cloud customers may find that the data they migrate to the cloud is at greater risk of leaks, leaks, and other threats.
Relying on the cloud provider's (CSP) own tools isn't always the answer. That's why organizations are increasingly turning to Bring Your Own Encryption (BYOE) products.
If data is the powerhouse of the modern enterprise, the public cloud is its engine room. It is estimated that 120 ZB of data will be created, captured, replicated and consumed globally this year.
Much of this will end up in the cloud, business and customer-facing applications, databases, storage infrastructure, backups, etc.
The challenge lies in the resulting complexity. Today, the vast majority (72%) of organizations run hybrid cloud environments, and even more (87%) have adopted multi-cloud.
When data is distributed across disparate environments like this, it can be difficult to track and secure, although this is becoming increasingly important because:
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Threat levels soar: U.S. data breaches on track for another record year. They are driven by ransomware campaigns, which increasingly feature data theft. It is estimated that the number of attacks will surge by 74% between the first quarter and the second quarter of 2023.
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The rising cost of a data breach: Latest estimates put the global cost per breach at a record $4.45 million, rising to $9.5 million in the US and $10.9 million in the healthcare industry.
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Increasingly stringent regulatory requirements: including GDPR and CCPA, as well as other US state-level data protection laws.
Against this backdrop, there are understandable concerns that CSP data protection solutions alone will not be sufficient to mitigate data security and compliance risks across different public cloud environments.
Not surprisingly, security is the second-largest cloud challenge for organizations worldwide after spending management, cited by 79 percent of respondents.
Against this backdrop, BYOE is an increasingly popular option.
The model is simple: public cloud customers use their preferred encryption solution instead of, or in addition to, the encryption solution offered natively by the cloud provider itself.
This means that the generation of encryption keys and tokenization secrets is 100% controlled by the customer, so only protected data is allowed into the public cloud.
The benefits are many and they include:
Consistency across clouds: Choosing to invest in security solutions offered by multiple CSPs can create inconsistencies and gaps in coverage. A single BYOE solution helps deliver a single, unified policy.
Data utility: Using format preserving encryption (FPE) or tokenization in their BYOE offerings, organizations gain the added benefit of being able to use sensitive data without any risk of data breaches. Otherwise, data teams can become frustrated by compliance requirements that effectively prevent them from using data in business growth projects such as cloud-driven analytics.
Additional Security and Control: Data is protected until it leaves the customer's premises, adding an additional layer of security. Customers also have full control over who can access and view decrypted data in the cloud, increasing their control.
Portability: Using a single BYOE solution across multiple cloud environments means organizations have more flexibility to migrate data across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments while maintaining consistent data security policies. It also makes application integration easier.
Compliance peace of mind: Strong data encryption in the public cloud will help meet stringent data protection regulations, such as those in the GDPR, ensuring that data remains secure throughout its lifecycle.