As the shares of cybersecurity companies zoom to new heights, there may be good reason: The topic of information and network security remains the number one issue for customers plotting their cloud technologies and services.

Last week I rambled through the RSA Conference in San Francisco for a day and then later heard from technology experts at the Netevents Cloud Innovation Summit in Tiburon, Calif. The conclusion from a variety of sources seems to be this: Security technology is failing to protect networks and data as the bad guys get more sophisticated in their attacks.

"The security market is fundamentally broken," RSA President Amit Yorannew told attendees of an RSA press conference. "The approach that our industry has taken is irreparably flawed, and we have to change."

Some more indications that this has become consensus:

"2014 was a terrible year for security," said Guido Appenzeller Chief Technology Strategy Officer for Network and Security with VMware, during his keynote at the Netevents Cloud Innovation Summit.

"Enterprises can't keep up up with security. Cloud actually offers the opportunity to take security to another level," said Eric Hutchinson, Spirent in a panel discussions at Netevents.

It's becoming clear to the the players that a new approach to security will be needed, and this will emerge as a array of security technologies in the cloud, often tightly linked to software virtualization.

Why? You ask. That's because, as stated above, we've lost confidence. And customers continue to question the security of everything -- including their data and applications, whether they are held closely or put in the cloud.

Jeremiah Caron, SVP at Current Analysis, said that when enterprise customers are polled about the concerns of moving to cloud-based strategy, security is at the top of the list. The top three concerns of enterprises considering a cloud strategy were security, (44% of respondents); reliability (29%); and data privacy (25%), according to the Current Analysis 2014 Enterprise Investment Plan Survey.

Although security tops the list, Caron points out that the cloud strategy brings out many concerns -- with 12 concerns gathering double-digit percentage responses (See chart below).

Appenzeller made the pitch that adding security layers to virtualization is an answer to the current security problems, a strategy that VMware is pursuing. You can read about that in our story from Friday.

Tom Gowen, Director of Services Integration with NTT America Inc., said service providers can play a vital role in security by using the cloud to aggregate data. For example, NTT can monitor global threat intelligence global data because it carries 40% of the internet data as a global ISP.

One of the themes that's growing is that cloud and virtualization technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will be important in solving security struggles, because of the ability to add network-wide analytics and forensic technology.

In the next few months the Rayno Report will be exploring this theme in our premium research. I'm happy to announce that we'll be joined by contributing analyst Rob Defrancesco, who will be analyzing and writing on security topics.

The Rayno Report will be covering the migration of security technology from hardware to the cloud in its forthcoming report on Cloud Security & Analytics, written by contributing analyst Rob Defrancesco. If you are interested in participating in this report, please contact Rob DeFrancesco at [email protected].