If a business isn’t in the cloud by now, the odds are good that it’s already operating in its shadow.

Cloud adoption trends that accelerated at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic have continued, with Forrester data showing 94% of enterprise infrastructure decision-makers have at least one cloud deployment. Meanwhile, new technology like AI has only made managing deployments more complex.

Here are three key factors that shaped the enterprise cloud market in 2022, according to experts who spoke with IT Brew.

AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure dig in. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft may be brawling with each other for market share, but their competitors are losing ground. According to Fierce Telecom, Synergy data in April 2022 showed that while other cloud providers like Alibaba, IBM, and Salesforce had grown revenues by 150% since 2018, their collective market share has dropped from 48% to 36%.

“It’s starting to become clear to regulators, and I suppose to customers as well, that the Big Three providers have more or less entrenched their positions,” Vili Lehdonvirta, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and author of Cloud Empires, wrote to IT Brew. “There were no more huge swings in market share and none of the smaller providers were able to challenge the three kings in a serious way. Switching a live service from one cloud provider to another is in many cases so complicated and expensive as to be practically impossible.”

Keep reading here.—TM

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Hackers are just like us—they can’t resist a Container Store.

Application containers, that is: the lightweight components powering many an app’s microservices. The software units, which isolate functions and require few resources, are appealing to developers looking to build apps and attackers looking to carry malware.

A November report from the cloud-native threat-detection company Sysdig found that the free, public-facing container registry known as Docker Hub held many malicious executable container files, also known as images. The findings offer a reminder to IT pros: Shared code has its dangers.

“Containers themselves are highly valuable. The functions that they provide for the business, the ability to create that scalability and that growth, are critical. But, the use from an open-source perspective [and] the lack of diligence that we’re performing when we are pulling down a container is the risk,” said Bill Young, VP and general manager of threat management at the consultancy Optiv.

A quick container explainer.

• What a container is: Traditionally, applications are run on an operating system. A container has everything it needs to run: application code, dependencies, systems libraries, and settings. With a platform like Kubernetes or Docker Engine, the container can be run across computing environments, including private data centers, public clouds, and laptops.
• Gimme an analogy: “It’s almost [like] having these little mini virtual machines, but you can have dozens and dozens running on a host at a time,” said Michael Clark, director of threat research at Sysdig. Almost. A key difference between containers and VMs is that containers virtualize at the OS level, while VMs virtualize at the hardware level.
• Why you might need dozens: Let’s say an application processes credit cards. A container could perform a validation task for an individual transaction, destroy itself, then a new container could be initiated for the next card.

Read more here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 24%. That’s how many tech industry applications contain “high-risk” security flaws, according to a new study from Veracode. (Help Net Security)

Quote: “If you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when joining Twitter, you accept liability to the full extent of the law and Twitter will immediately seek damages.”—Twitter CEO Elon Musk, in an email threatening to sue Twitter employees who leaked confidential information (Platformer)

Read: A new Uber data breach, this one via a third-party vendor, has led to employee and corporate information being leaked. (Bleeping Computer)

Shoot for Zero: In this white paper from Axonius, learn why implementing a Zero Trust strategy (aka risk-driven and context-aware) is key to strengthening your cybersecurity. Take the first step here.*

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