While the ability to rapidly provision (and scale) cloud-based computing environments is significant, the need to rapidly deploy products to secure these environments is equally salient. To support this requirement, many security vendors have developed virtual machines or instance-based versions of traditional security products and made them available via public IaaS vendor marketplaces. NSS Labs refers to these as cloud-based security (CBS) products.

This report provides an overview of cloud-based security in US enterprises, to examine current deployments of this segment, show commonly deployed cloud-based security technology architectures, and enumerate commonly employed cloud-based security functionality. The paper includes results from the NSS Labs 2018 Cloud-Delivered Security Study and selected results from the NSS Labs 2017 Cloud Security Study. Both studies surveyed full-time IT security professionals with a minimum of three years in role, employed at organizations with a minimum of 500 employees.