Companies are increasingly pursuing a cloud-first strategy by developing and deploying applications with the cloud in mind. With the majority of organizations adopting a hybrid or multi-cloud approach to support various use cases and work models, the attack surface has significantly broadened, making securing today’s cloud environments more critical and increasingly complex.
The 2024 Cloud Security Report, based on a comprehensive survey of 927 cybersecurity professionals worldwide, provides critical insights into the current trends driving cloud security. It explores key challenges in protecting complex cloud environments, what solutions and strategies cybersecurity professionals are prioritizing, how they’re allocating their resources, and the best practices they’re adopting to ensure the security of cloud workloads.
Key findings include:
• Multi-Cloud Preference: A majority of organizations (78%) opt for hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to combine flexibility, control, and the unique benefits of various cloud services.
• Cloud Adoption Barriers: Security and compliance concerns (59%) are critical roadblocks to faster adoption of multi-cloud strategies. Technical challenges (52%) and resource constraints (49%) present substantial challenges in achieving visibility and policy control within complex multi-cloud infrastructures and emphasize the necessity for robust cloud security expertise.
• Cybersecurity Talent Shortage: Companies face a critical shortage of cybersecurity expertise, with 93% of respondents concerned about finding qualified professionals to protect complex multi-cloud environments. This directly affects their security posture and strategic efforts. This persistent scarcity of cloud security expertise hinders faster and more widespread adoption of multi-cloud strategies.
• Unified Cloud Security Platform Preference: 95% of respondents advocate for a single platform to streamline security across cloud environments. The objective is to simplify and automate security management, mitigate the talent gap, and enhance security through consistent policy enforcement and visibility, addressing the inefficiencies of managing multiple disparate security systems.
We would like to thank Fortinet for the invaluable support of this important industry research project.
We hope this report serves as a practical guide for cybersecurity leaders and practitioners to navigate the complexities of cloud security more effectively in your ongoing efforts to secure your organization’s cloud journey against evolving cyber threats
