10 Cloud Security CEOs On Their Biggest Opportunity In 2024

CEOs from top cloud security vendors including Wiz, Lacework and Netskope revealed the key market opportunities they’re focusing on with partners this year.

Cloud Security Opportunities

Within the fast-moving, highly complex world of cloud security, innovative vendors are seeing massive opportunities. The transition to cloud infrastructure and cloud-native applications has led to huge gaps in security, which threat actors have wasted no time exploiting. Cloud security companies with novel approaches for addressing these challenges are among the fastest growing — and highest valued — within the cybersecurity industry in 2024. CRN has recently heard from the CEOs of many of these top cloud security vendors as part of our CEO Outlook 2024 report.

For the report, CEOs from 10 notable cloud security companies revealed the biggest market opportunities they’re focusing on with partners this year. Among the CEO respondents were Wiz’s Assaf Rappaport, Netskope’s Sanjay Beri and Lacework’s CEO Jay Parikh.

As noted by Parikh, the dynamic nature of the cloud is helping to drive many of the opportunities for cloud security vendors in 2024. And these are opportunities shared by vendors and channel partners alike, Parikh said.

“Securing your cloud is extremely hard because everything is changing all the time,” he said. “The winners will be the partner-vendor teams that deliver a unified platform that not only offers cloud security coverage from code security through runtime workloads, but is also a platform that continues to meet an organization's security needs as its cloud journey evolves and matures.”

For CEO Outlook 2024, CRN asked the CEOs of major cloud security companies this question: What is the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2024?

What follows are the answers provided by 10 top cloud security CEOs.

(Note: Insights from the CEOs of additional cloud security vendors — including Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and SentinelOne — are included in our post, Here’s What 10 Top Cybersecurity CEOs Are Prioritizing In 2024.)

Dror Davidoff

Co-Founder and CEO, Aqua Security

Virtually every organization around the world is moving to the cloud to gain speed and agility. They are doing this by building a new class of cloud-first applications called cloud-native applications. This shift to the cloud introduces new DevSecOps processes and tools, and also introduces new security concerns. The opportunity for our partners is to be the leader in securing these digital transformations. We are discovering that the majority of companies have not led their digital transformations with a secure by design approach, making them more vulnerable and needing the assistance of our partners more than ever.

Matthew Prince

Co-Founder and CEO, Cloudflare

Cloudflare's connectivity cloud gives customers the power to say, how can I secure, speed up, and simplify my deployment? How can I dramatically decrease the cost of what I'm spending for this solution? This is possible through Cloudflare's all-in-one cloud network security, connectivity and performance solution. Our partners sit at the forefront of extending this suite to even more customers and being able to create their own business streams with Cloudflare. What we're hearing time and time again, is that we're able to give enterprises the comprehensive tools they need to secure and connect their teams and networks through a unified control plane. What we usually see, in customers adopting the entire Cloudflare suite, is that they were able to save about 50 percent over what they were spending — versus trying to cobble together numerous, different solutions. Consolidation of services, while increasing productivity and security, is a win-win for businesses. Our channel partners have a huge opportunity to be part of today's market and cloud evolution with Cloudflare.

Matt Cohen

CEO, CyberArk

The rise in human and machine identities, particularly in cloud environments, continues to drive up risk for organizations around the world. The [CyberArk] platform enables secure access for any identity to any resource – protecting identities and critical assets by enabling Zero Trust and enforcing least privilege. CyberArk will further advance its cloud security capabilities in 2024, including solutions that provide just-in-time access with zero standing privileges to cloud management consoles and services running in multi-cloud environments. The need to protect all identities across an organization – IT, workforce, developers and machine identities – all with a comprehensive Identity Security Platform – is the biggest market opportunity for CyberArk, and our global channel partners.

Merav Bahat

Co-Founder and CEO, Dazz

Just before 2023 ended, Dazz introduced its new unified remediation platform — an industry-first solution providing CISOs with comprehensive visibility across their code, clouds, applications and infrastructure in concert with their best-of-breed detection tools. It's a game changer for resource-constrained security teams to swiftly prioritize and remediate critical issues with their engineering counterparts. As we enter 2024, we are focused on executing our product vision and advancing the remediation market. We're currently onboarding new channel leads to drive this vision forward, building tech partnerships and reseller programs in addition to what we have already established with global VARs and with all three major cloud marketplaces: AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Jay Parikh

CEO, Lacework

This year Lacework will work with our partners to help existing and new customers do even more in the cloud, with the confidence that Lacework is their safety net. Our partner ecosystem is able to use Lacework to meet customers wherever they are on their cloud journey to develop a culture of security. For those that are early in their cloud journey, their needs might be single cloud protection, visibility into risk across services and workloads, continuous compliance, threat detection, and prioritizing the things that matter most. Mature cloud shops are looking for advanced cloud threat detection and response, risk management across expansive attack surfaces, comprehensive code security, actionable team

workflows with context and guidance, and multi-cloud protection. Securing your cloud is extremely hard because everything is changing all the time. It is why it's such a large and fast-growing market. The winners will be the partner-vendor teams that deliver a unified platform that not only offers cloud security coverage from code security through runtime workloads, but is also a platform that continues to meet an organization's security needs as its cloud journey evolves and matures.

Sanjay Beri

Co-Founder and CEO, Netskope

The collaboration between Netskope and our partner community in navigating the rapidly expanding market for SASE and Zero Trust solutions is our primary focus for 2024 and the foreseeable future. The uniqueness of the Netskope platform positions us to strategically align with our partners and deliver tailored SASE capabilities to suit diverse business needs. Together, we aim to address the requirements of a spectrum of businesses, from large enterprises navigating mixed-vendor environments to midmarket companies seeking consolidated cost effective options through their MSP and MSSPs. Netskope remains committed to guiding customers at every stage of their SASE and Zero Trust journey - whether it's helping assess if the right next step is full platform convergence, completing a VPN replacement, providing better visibility and control, implementing advanced DLP, or reaching any other critical milestone. Our channel-first approach ensures that Netskope and our partners work hand-in-hand, providing customized solutions to address the evolving needs of customers and provide the level of service and innovation they rightfully demand.

Gil Geron

Co-Founder and CEO, Orca Security

Our priority in 2024 is to help organizations achieve more with less, which for us translates into working with a carefully selected group of best-of-breed partners who are leaders in their respective fields. Additionally, we recognize that managed services represent a significant opportunity to further enable our customers to accomplish more with fewer resources. We are partnering with industry-leading providers to expand our offering to help take advantage of these services to better reduce costs, streamline operations, and enhance their success.

Gee Rittenhouse

CEO, Skyhigh Security

Generative AI has the potential to impact, or in some cases even radically transform, a wide range of industries, so it's no surprise that customers have serious questions about how this new technology will affect their security posture. They are seeking guidance and support on everything from emerging AI-powered threats to how to safely integrate AI into their workflows, and they're looking to organizations like Skyhigh Security and our partners to provide information and solutions to their most pressing concerns. The biggest market opportunity for us will be enabling organizations to leverage this new technology securely, through the implementation of Zero Trust and other architectures, so they can reap benefits like greater creativity, efficiency, and time management without putting their data at risk.

Peter McKay

CEO, Snyk

The biggest market opportunity for us is clicking into generative AI's increasing role in software development. As found in Snyk's recent GenAI report, 80 percent of organizations' developers are actually bypassing AI security policies to save time, with only 10 percent scanning most code to check the security of open-source components. We need to re- focus on how developers and security teams are utilizing GenAI and put in place security measures that handle the rapid pace of code development, fully automate security processes, and educate teams on using AI suggestions securely. Companies need to empower their customers to safely scale this new technology – all while doing so with the right security measures in place. We want to help cybersecurity and application security (AppSec) teams better understand the extent to which software engineering teams are leveraging generative AI as they code, as well. We've seen a massive disparity between how much generative AI security teams thought developers were leveraging and the actual amount of generative AI developers were leveraging as they built code. The goal for Snyk is to create more synergy in 2024 between developer and security teams when it comes to generative AI.

Assaf Rappaport

Co-Founder and CEO, Wiz

Wiz officially launched our channel program in 2023 and it's grown fast since then. As we approach the one-year anniversary, AI is creating a surge in demand for cloud security, and that is where we see the biggest market opportunity. Wiz sees some sort of AI service present in over 70 percent of customer environments. Such explosive growth reminds me of the early days of cloud, where adoption skyrocketed but process and governance took a bit to catch up. So now you're contending with things like Shadow AI, and teams racing to bring AI solutions to production: developers, cloud teams, data scientists, AI engineers. These people are all part of the new cloud operating model, making it even more important to foster a culture of security ownership. Together with our partners Wiz is helping customers secure these environments with visibility, accuracy, and a prioritized view of risk. The timing has never been better to partner with Wiz.