Fortinet survey indicates complexity of cloud security

According to the findings, 67% of the experts say that misconfiguration of cloud security is the biggest cloud security risk. Most of the organizations are interested in a single cloud security platform  

Fortinet survey indicates complexity of cloud security

BIGSTOCK/Copyright: World Image

Fortinet, a provider of broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, published the findings of the survey it carried out with Cybersecurity Insiders in the company's 2021 Cloud Security Report. The survey was conducted among more than 500 cybersecurity experts working in various industries worldwide. The following are the main findings.

Role of cloud security in the diverse digital landscape 

According to the findings, organizations continue to rapidly adopt cloud to meet key business objectives, with 33% of organizations running more than half of their workloads in the cloud today, and that number is expected to rise to 56% in the next 12–18 months.

Multi-cloud environments have become the norm, whether as a chosen strategy or simply where organizations end up, with most organizations pursuing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy (71%) for integration of multiple services, scalability, or business continuity reasons. The survey also found that 76% of organizations are using two or more cloud providers. That doesn’t mean that on-premises has gone away - hybrid still accounts for more than one-third of deployments. What it does mean is that organizations are now operating in an expanded and diverse digital landscape.

Sophisticated and challenging threat landscape

Given the similarly expanding digital threat landscape, it's not surprising that security remains a concern. Virtually all respondents indicated that they were at least moderately concerned about the security of public clouds, nearly one-third being extremely so. 

According to the findings, misconfiguration of cloud security remains the biggest cloud security risk according to 67% of cybersecurity professionals. 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.

At the same time, cybersecurity professionals are operating under tight budget constraints, with cost being the primary criteria for deciding which security solution to implement. It seems some organizations may still not have grasped that, in order to achieve the business goals that they are looking to realize with cloud, cloud security is a critical enabler. 

Cloud security strategy that bridges complexity

Addressing the challenges outlined in the 2021 Cloud Security Report clearly demands a strategy that embraces complexity. Organizations are grappling with a diverse set of tools that deliver disparate controls and highly variable security posture, specific to each cloud platform. 

"The cloud is a critical part of today's digital landscape for the majority of organizations, and often is the factor enabling their future success. Coordination between the security strategy and the business strategy is the key to a safer future," said Ofer Israeli, Country Manager Israel at Fortinet.