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 organizations are using cloud, and the best practices they are prioritizing. Let’s take a look at some of the key findings.
Organizations continue to rapidly adopt 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 organizations are running more than half of their workloads in the cloud today.
From a big picture point of view, hybrid and multi-cloud, whether as a chosen strategy or simply where organizations end up, are very much the norm. The report found that a majority of organizations are pursuing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy (71%) and site a number of reasons for this—including integration of multiple services, scalability, or business continuity reasons. 76% of organizations are using two or more cloud providers.
That of course does not mean that on-premises has gone away. In fact, 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.
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. Misconfiguration of cloud security remains the biggest cloud security risk according to 67% of cybersecurity professionals. Further, the complexity of managing multi-cloud environments is clearly adding to what is already a challenging task.Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed noted that their biggest concern when securing multi-cloud environments was ensuring data protection and privacy for each environment.
Considering these challenges facing their organization, 78% 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. Despite this, cloud security is a critical enabler and a robust, adaptive cloud security strategy is an important part of achieving the business goals that they are looking to realize with cloud.
For those organizations struggling with their cloud adoption, some of the biggest barriers cited by those surveyed have been a lack of visibility (53%) and not enough control (46%) in cloud environments.
Addressing the challenges outlined in the 2021 Cloud Security Report clearly requires that organizations accept that complexity can be an unavoidable part of their cloud journey without the right tools and embrace a strategy that simplifies cloud operations. With the right solutions and strategy, organizations can achieve visibility and control throughout their cloud deployments and downstream evolution. Organizations 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 organizations 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 uniform security posture, it also simplifies cyber defense, 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.
Click here to learn more about integrating FortiGate into your Microsoft Azure environment, or watch our step-by-step tutorial for details on deployment.
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