Technology industry analyst firm Gartner Inc. Thursday published its latest Hype Cycle for Cloud Security products, which is designed to inform security personnel about which technologies are ready for mainstream adoption and which are not quite ready for prime time.

Gartner said rapid growth in the adoption of cloud technologies is driving huge interest in products that can secure data, applications and workloads running in those environments.

Gartner lumps Cloud Security products into different segments, depending on how mature it sees those products. The first of these is the “innovation trigger,” which refers to relatively unknown and immature emerging technologies.

The next category is the “peak of inflated expectations.” Technologies here generally have a lot of unrealistic projections around them, and the hype surrounding them isn’t reflected by the number of successful deployments in mainstream use. Cloud security technologies currently at this peak include data loss protection for mobile devices, key management as-a-service and software-defined perimeter.

Technologies that don’t live up to the hype usually become unfashionable and move to Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment” as users struggle to ascertain their real value. The analyst firm said two key technologies are currently at this stage of maturity: disaster recovery as a service and private cloud computing.

DRaaS currently has a market penetration below 50 percent, with most early adopters being small organizations of fewer than 100 employees that lack a recovery data center and the skills to manage disaster recovery by themselves. As for private clouds, Gartner said the use of third-party specialists for building private clouds is growing rapidly because the cost and complexity of building a true private cloud can be high.

The next category, the slope of enlightenment, refers to technologies that are seeing experimentation pay off, as a diverse range of companies begin to use them in production. These technologies are set to reach full maturity within the next couple of years, and include things such as data loss protection, which is regarded as an efficient method of protecting against the accidental disclosure of regulated data and intellectual property. Gartner said that, in reality, data loss protection has proved useful in helping organizations to identify broken business processes that can lead to accidental data disclosures. However, Gartner warned that it’s still relatively easy for determined attackers to circumvent these systems.

Infrastructure as a service container encryption also finds itself in the slope of enlightenment. The technology provides a way for organizations to protect data held in public clouds, and is already a central feature in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Cloud Security in 2017. Source: Gartner Inc.

The last category is the “plateau of productivity,” which means the real-world benefits of the technology are widely accepted. Technologies such as tokenization, high-assurance hypervisors and application security as a service have all stepped up to this level in the past 12 months, Gartner said.

“Security continues to be the most commonly cited reason for avoiding the use of public cloud,” said Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner. “Yet paradoxically, the organizations already using the public cloud consider security to be one of the primary benefits.”

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