In 2023, the cloud is fundamentally delivering on its promised business outcomes, including flexible capacity and scalability, increased agility, improved availability, and accelerated deployment and provisioning.
However, security concerns remain a critical barrier to cloud adoption, showing little signs of improvement in the perception of cloud security professionals. Cloud adoption is further inhibited by a number of related challenges that prevent the faster and broader embracement of cloud services, including the continued lack of cloud security talent, proliferating compliance requirements, and the significant lack of visibility and control, especially in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
This 2023 Cloud Security Report surveyed 752 cybersecurity professionals to reveal key challenges and priorities, including:
• Cloud security continues to be a significant issue, with 95% of surveyed organizations concerned about their security posture in public cloud environments. Misconfiguration remains the biggest cloud security risk, according to 59% of cybersecurity professionals. This is closely followed by exfiltration of sensitive data and insecure interfaces/APIs (tied at 51%), and unauthorized access (49%).
• Despite economic headwinds, cloud security budgets are increasing for the majority of organizations (60%) by an average of 33%.
• 44% of organizations are looking for ways to achieve better visibility and control in securing hybrid and multi-cloud networks, with 90% looking for a single cloud security platform to protect data consistently and comprehensively across their cloud footprint.
We would like to thank Fortinet for supporting this important industry research project. We hope you’ll find this report informative and helpful as you continue your efforts to secure your organization’s cloud journey against evolving threats.
