Almost 95% of orgs concerned about public cloud security, says study

As organisations continue to shift workloads to the cloud to achieve faster time to market and cost reductions, cloud security continues to remain a top concern. A new study by Fortinet shows that 95% of organisations are ‘moderately’ to ‘extremely’ worried about cloud security as they are likely to have ‘more than half their workloads in the cloud within the next 12-18 months’. 

On what hinders cloud adoption, the 2022 Cloud Security Report, which polled over 800 security leaders across the globe, reveals that a majority of CISOs said that they discovered lack of visibility; high cost, lack of control, and lack of security as the biggest unforeseen factors that slow or stop cloud adoption. These remain to be consistently top inhibitors of cloud when comparing against previous surveys. Addressing these topics is critical to empowering business success.  

“Cloud is a critical element of the digital strategy of almost every organisation, of every size, and across all industries. Securing this transition is critical,” said Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC and Southeast Asia at Fortinet. 

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The survey also reveals that the biggest challenges organisations face is not primarily about technology, but people and processes. Lack of qualified staff (40%, up from 37% last year) is the biggest obstacle to faster adoption, followed by legal and regulatory compliance, and data security issues. Internal upskilling as well as external expertise are major game-changers to accelerating cloud success, said Raman.  

According to the study, most organisations are selecting either a hybrid-cloud (39%, up from 36% last year) or multi-cloud deployment approach (33%) to integrate multiple services, provide scalability, or ensure business continuity. Seventy-six per cent of organisations currently use two or more cloud providers. AWS and Microsoft Azure currently top the list, though Google and Oracle are rapidly increasing their investment and market share.  

And with most organisations choosing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, not surprisingly, they face increased complexity and security challenges. Lack of security skills becomes the top challenge (61%, up from 57% last year), followed by data protection, understanding how different solutions fit together, and loss of visibility and control. Simplifying this complexity is the key.  

However, to reduce complexity and increase security effectiveness, over three-quarters (78%) of respondents consider it very or extremely helpful to have a single cloud security platform to protect data consistently and comprehensively across their cloud footprint, the study said.