The infrastructures and architectures of most large enterprises are starting to resemble those of service providers – with networked datacenters, diverse communication channels, distributed user communities, elastic and scalable services, and agile delivery. This constantly evolving and expanding ecosystem often includes a rapid influx of new technologies and capabilities that are only surpassed by the growing and intensifying threat landscape rising from these advancements. Not only are these environments much more difficult and complex to secure than traditional, centralized IT, but there is also a steep learning curve to fully grasp the intricacies of a 'service provider like' model. With this mind, 451 Research recently asked several service providers what advice they have for enterprises moving in this direction.

Enterprise infrastructures have evolved beyond being solely built to offer intra-company connectivity and services to employees. They now provide services directly to customers, enabling and powering new products and services, and integrating with a long chain of partners, suppliers and distributors. However, securing such customer-facing cloud environments that operate at scale is significantly more challenging. Organizations have to take into account factors such as threat detection and regulatory compliance across multi-cloud, identity management, and disparate tools for edge device authentication. Assuming all clouds are alike is one of the main mistakes enterprises make. Security experts with service providers of all sizes have many recommendations for enterprises such as having a defense-in-depth strategy with comprehensive controls, leveraging APIs and automation to the greatest extent possible, and partnering as needed to fill skills and capability gaps.

It's easy to think of cloud adoption as a one-time event – you choose a cloud and you consume that cloud, and the rest is history – but realistically, for most enterprises this is an incremental and iterative process. Traditional refresh cycles drive periodic purchases of new hardware and updates of software – for cloud, rapidly growing feature sets and on-demand consumption require frequent reassessment of the venues and technologies that best meet changing enterprise needs. No one wants to move providers all the time – enterprises naturally try and optimize what they already have; providers that are best at accommodating them are likely to have the most loyal customers.

451 Research’s most recent Voice of the Enterprise: Internet of Things Vendor Evaluations survey found that security continues to be a major concern for IT professionals when deploying IoT projects within their organizations. When asked to rank which technologies or processes their organizations considered for current or planned IoT initiatives, 55% of respondents ranked IoT security as their top priority.