Emerging need for visibility across cloud will require ambitious professionals to evolve and adapt.

Trend Micro has predicted that the security operation center (SOC) within organizations will absorb cloud security by 2026.

Security leaders are recognizing that cloud and the way cloud security teams work today are becoming increasingly critical to business and IT operations. As a result, cloud security and the foundational practices of their teams will be absorbed into the SOC to increase efficiencies in the coming years.

“Valuable innovations always cross the threshold and are absorbed into standard operations — happened with virtualization, and it will happen again with cloud,” said Mike Milner, VP of cloud technology at Trend Micro. “The organizations and individuals that lean into this will lead the way.”

Leaders who have successfully navigated cloud security are well placed to navigate a similar move to the modern SOC landscape.

Software is consuming everything, creating system infrastructure that is increasingly defined as code and reliant on large volumes of data with automation as the cornerstone for delivering value at increasing speeds. All these principles are foundational to teams building and securing in the cloud, but SOC and IT infrastructure teams’ tooling, like cross-detection and response (XDR), also leverage these concepts and can benefit from absorbing the scale, skills, and expertise of cloud teams.

Trend’s prediction is that viable SOC tools will grow to include cloud protection capabilities. With the increased inclusion of cloud detection and response (CDR) within XDR platforms, the SOC function will have an increased scope that will also impact leadership qualifications.

Global organizations are set to spend US$600 billion on public cloud services this year as the technology increasingly becomes an integral part of standard IT operations. Recent estimates suggest 87% of enterprises have already embraced multi-cloud and 72% are running hybrid cloud environments.

Organizations wanting to leverage the combined strengths of their organizations might look to security partners with expertise in both cloud security and SOC tooling to smooth the transition in addition to these recommendations: