(To download the 2021 Cloud Security Report, complete form at right.)
Organizations continue to rapidly migrate workloads from datacenters to the cloud, and the trend has been accelerating during the recent Covid pandemic. Cloud security concerns remain high as the adoption of public cloud computing continues to surge in the wake of the pandemic and the resulting massive shift to remote work.
The 2021 Cloud Security Report is based on a comprehensive global survey of 572 cybersecurity professionals to reveal how organizations are responding to security threats in the cloud, and which tools and best practices IT cybersecurity leaders are prioritizing in their move to the cloud.
Key survey findings include:
• Most organizations are pursuing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy (71%). They are doing this for
integration of multiple services, scalability, or business continuity reasons. Few companies rely on a single cloud deployment (27%) for their business needs.
• Seventy-six percent of organizations are using two or more cloud providers.
• Among the key barriers to faster cloud adoption, survey participants mentioned lack of visibility (53%), lack of control (46%), lack of staff resources or expertise (39%), and high cost (35%) as the most significant negative factors.
• Misconfiguration of cloud security remains the biggest cloud security risk according to 67% of cybersecurity professionals in our survey. This is followed by exfiltration of sensitive data (59%) and tying at 49% are unauthorized access and insecure interfaces/APIs.
• Multi-cloud environments add complexity and security challenges. In our survey, organizations are most concerned with data protection (58%) followed by a lack of security skills (57%) and understanding how different solutions fit together (52%).
• Seventy-eight percent of surveyed cybersecurity professionals would find it very helpful to extremely helpful to have a single cloud security platform offering a single dashboard while allowing for configuration of policies to protect data consistently and comprehensively across the cloud.
We would like to thank Fortinet for supporting this important research.
