LAS VEGAS – Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora forecasts cloud security will account for two to five percent of the $1 trillion public cloud annual spending in the next decade, and the vendor is still in the early stages of winning that up to $50 billion market.

Arora expects half of all computing will be done on the public cloud, and he believes most companies that have less than five or $10 billion in revenue should not have their own data centers.

Meanwhile, third-party observers forecast that cloud spending will reach $1 trillion. That number was zero four and a half years ago, Arora noted, emphasizing the hyper-growth that creates a huge opportunity for cloud security vendors.

“We came to the conclusion that 75% of the applications were actually home-grown, built by enterprises for themselves last year. Lifting and shifting and re-architecting them onto the public cloud is a bigger security risk than Salesforce and others having security issues,” Arora said.

“If $1 trillion is spent in the cloud every year, in ten years the security attack should be about [2%] to 5%,” he added.

That math is based on Palo Alto Networks’ own cloud and cloud security spending. The company is using its own Prisma Cloud services, but if it had to pay for them, that would cost around $10-20 million, which is around 2%-5% of its $250 million cloud bills.

Arora pointed out that Palo Alto Networks has been building and pumping up its cloud security platform to gain a share of that potentially $50 billion market. The vendor's latest move was to add more than 25 new features to its Prisma Cloud platform, including secrets scanning, API risk profiling, and the integration of its cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) IAM Identity Center.

“We spent the last four years stitching together, building both organically and through acquisitions in cloud security platform, which now has more than 2,000 customers, 70 of the Fortune 100 at Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud. And we think we're still very early,” he said.