With cloud security continuing to be a hot topic in 2021, Fortinet and Cybersecurity Insiders decided to ask cybersecurity professionals around the world and across all industries for their latest insight.
The brand new 2021 Cloud Security Report reveals how more than 500 cybersecurity professionals —from technical executives to managers and IT security practitioners — are responding to security threats in the cloud, how their organisations are using the cloud, and the best practices they are prioritising. Let’s take a look at some of the key findings.
1. A Diverse Digital Landscape – The Role of Cloud Security
First, and perhaps not surprisingly, organisations continue to rapidly adopt the cloud to meet key business objectives. And that trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. The report indicates that 33% of organisations are running more than half of their workloads in the cloud today, and that number is set to rise to 56% in the next 12–18 months.
And multi-cloud, whether as a chosen strategy or simply where organisations end up, is very much the norm. Most organisations are pursuing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy (71%).
They are doing this for the integration of multiple services, scalability, or business continuity reasons. 76% of organisations 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 organisations are now operating in an expanded and diverse digital landscape.
2. Cloud Security Providers – A Sophisticated Threat Landscape
Given the similarly expanding digital threat landscape, it’s perhaps 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. That said, it’s not threat actors that top the list of cloud security threats, misconfiguration wins that vote.
The complexity of managing multi-cloud environments is clearly adding to what is already a challenging task.
Misconfiguration of cloud security remains the biggest cloud security risk according to 67% of cybersecurity professionals. Seventy-eight per cent 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 organisations 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.
3. A Cloud Security Strategy that Bridges Complexity
Addressing the challenges outlined in the 2021 Cloud Security Report clearly demands a strategy that embraces complexity. Organisations are grappling with a diverse set of tools that deliver disparate controls and highly variable security posture, specific to each cloud platform.
The Fortinet Adaptive Cloud Security portfolio offers organisations the ability to bridge this complexity. Deeply integrated, cloud-native solutions provide consistent visibility, protection and control through consistent policies that span the diverse array of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
This common security framework not only delivers a uniform security posture, it also simplifies cyber defence, compliance reporting and data sharing. Teams are free to adopt whichever cloud platform suits their particular needs, confident that their data and applications will be safe, resilient and securely accessible in each.
Cloud is now a critical part of the digital landscape for most organisations, and often a key enabler for future success. Aligning security strategy and business strategy is key to ensuring that this future is one you can always trust.
By Doros Hadjizenonos, Regional sales manager at Fortinet
