In 2023, the cloud is fundamentally delivering on its promised business outcomes, including flexible capacity and scalability, increased agility, improved availability, and accelerated deployment and provisioning.
However, security concerns remain a critical barrier to cloud adoption, showing little signs of improvement in the perception of cloud security professionals. Cloud adoption is further inhibited by a number of related challenges that prevent the faster and broader embracement of cloud services, including the continued lack of cloud security talent, proliferating compliance requirements, and the significant lack of visibility and control, especially in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
This 2023 Cloud Security Report surveyed 752 cybersecurity professionals to reveal key challenges and priorities, including:
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Cloud security continues to be a significant issue, with 95% of surveyed organizations concerned about their security posture in public cloud environments. Misconfiguration remains the biggest cloud security risk, according to 59% of cybersecurity professionals. This is closely followed by exfiltration of sensitive data and insecure interfaces/APIs (tied at 51%), and unauthorized access (49%).
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Despite economic headwinds, cloud security budgets are increasing for the majority of organizations (60%) by an average of 33%.
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44% of organizations are looking for ways to achieve better visibility and control in securing hybrid and multi-cloud networks, with 90% looking for a single cloud security platform to protect data consistently and comprehensively across their cloud footprint.
We would like to thank Fortinet for supporting this important industry research project. We hope you’ll find this report informative and helpful as you continue your efforts to secure your organization’s cloud journey against evolving threats.
Thank you,
Holger Schulze
CEO and Founder Cybersecurity Insiders
Current State of Cloud Adoption
WORKLOADS IN THE CLOUD
Despite a leveling out of cloud adoption year-over-year, the pace of moving workloads to the cloud remains strong. Today, 39% of respondents have more than half of their workloads in the cloud, while 58% plan to reach this level in the next 12–18 months.
MULTI-CLOUD ADOPTION
As workloads move to the cloud, organizations are selecting the cloud platform that’s the best fit for each project. This is driving multi-cloud proliferation with nearly seven out of 10 companies in our survey using two or more cloud providers (69%).
PREFERRED CLOUD PROVIDERS
Which cloud providers are organizations prioritizing? The big name providers, such as Microsoft Azure (72%) and Amazon Web Services (67%), continue to dominate the market. However, future cloud adoption is highest for Google Cloud Platform (+21%) and Oracle Cloud (+20%).
CLOUD SERVICES PRIORITIES
It seems the cloud is not just about compute and storage. Interestingly, security services are the top workload deployed in the cloud (56%), just ahead of compute (54%), storage (52%), and even applications (51%).
What services and workloads is your organization deploying in the cloud?
Productivity applications (email, collaboration, instant messaging, etc.) 50% | Virtualization 49% | Database (relational, NoSQL, caching, etc.) 46% | IT operations applications (administration, backup, provisioning, monitoring, etc.) 45% | Developer/testing applications 40% | Networking and content delivery (virtual private cloud, DNS, etc.) 38% | Operating system 34% | Desktop and application streaming 22% | Middleware 22% | Runtime 14% | Don’t know/other 6%
BARRIERS TO CLOUD ADOPTION
While the cloud offers important advantages, significant barriers to cloud adoption still exist. The biggest challenges organizations are facing are not primarily about technology, but people and processes. Most critical is the perennial lack of qualified staff (37%), which continues to be the largest impediment to faster adoption, despite dropping slightly from last year. This is closely followed by legal and regulatory compliance (30%), data security issues (29%), and integration with existing IT environments (27%).
Fear of vendor lock-in 24% | General security risks 23% | Lack of budget 22% | Cost/lack of ROI 21% | Internal resistance and inertia 20% |
Loss of control 19% | Complexity managing cloud deployment 18% | Lack of transparency and visibility 15% | Billing and tracking issues 14% |
Lack of maturity of cloud service models 13% | Lack of management buy-in 13% | Dissatisfaction with cloud service offerings/performance/
pricing 12% | Lack of customizability 10% | Lack of support by cloud provider 8% | Performance of apps in the cloud 8% | Availability 8% | Other 5%
Benefits of the Cloud
KEY CLOUD BENEFITS
After years of cloud adoption, do organizations believe cloud computing is delivering on its promise? The answer is yes. Cloud users affirm that the cloud is delivering key business benefits, including flexibility and scale (53%), agility (45%), business continuity (44%), and accelerated deployment and provisioning (41%). This is the first year that accelerated deployment has made it into the top four, leapfrogging both performance and the move to variable OpEx.
Improved performance 36% | Accelerated time to market 34% | Moved expenses from fixed CapEx (purchase) to variable OpEx (rental/subscription) 34% | Reduced cost 32% | Improved security 32% | Increased geographic reach 27% | Increased employee productivity 25% Reduced complexity 23% | Improved regulatory compliance 22% | Not sure/other 12%
CLOUD BUSINESS OUTCOMES
The benefits of the cloud are driving key business outcomes, and this year responsiveness to customer needs (52%) becomes the top outcome instead of accelerated time to market (48%). Organizations that are smart about integrating cybersecurity into their move to the cloud are also seeing its value to the business in lower risk and improved security (42%) and in cost reductions (41%).
Expanded market reach to new markets 23% | Accelerated revenue growth in existing markets 22% | Achieved parity with competitors 22% | Other 7%
Security Challenges in the Cloud
PUBLIC CLOUD SECURITY CONCERNS
Despite increasing cloud adoption, cloud security concerns show no signs of improving. Virtually all surveyed organizations are moderately to extremely concerned about their security posture in public cloud environments (95%). The number of organizations that are extremely concerned about public cloud security even increased this year — 35%, up from 32%.
RISK OF A BREACH
Concerns about public cloud security, combined with a lack of resources and expertise, are driving the perception that the risk of a security breach in the public cloud is higher than in traditional on- premises environments (43%). Only 27% of security professionals perceive risk to be lower in a public cloud environment.
OPERATIONAL SECURITY HEADACHES
Cybersecurity professionals face numerous challenges when it comes to protecting cloud workloads. The people factor again sits at the top of the list, lack of qualified security staff (43%), closely followed by compliance (37%). Multi-cloud proliferation is almost certainly the reason behind the headache of delivering consistent security policies (32%).
Controls and automation 30% | Can’t identify misconfigurations quickly 29% | Automatically enforcing security across multiple clouds 29% | Complex cloud to cloud/cloud to on-premises security rule matching 25% | Securing traffic flows 25% | Securing access from personal and mobile devices 25% | Security can’t keep up with the pace of changes to new/existing applications 25% | Lack of integration with on-premises security technologies 25% | Setting the correct user access privileges 24% | Remediating threats 24% | Justifying more security spending 24% | Understanding network traffic patterns 23% | No automatic discovery/visibility/control to infrastructure security 22% | Reporting security threats 21% | Lack of feature parity with on-premises security solution 21% | No flexibility 6% | Not sure/other 10%
MULTI-CLOUD SECURITY CHALLENGES
Multi-cloud environments increase the complexity and challenges of securing cloud workloads. The people factor and the expertise that multi-cloud environments demand is clearly highlighted in the fact that three out of the four top challenges are related to having the right skills, along with an in-depth understanding of each cloud platform.
Keeping up with the rate of change 38% | Managing the costs of different solutions 37% | Providing seamless access to users based on their credentials 37% | Selecting the right set of services 36% | Other 3%
CLOUD SECURITY THREATS
Which cloud security threats keep cybersecurity professionals up at night? The same top four as last year, with misconfiguration continuing to hold the top spot, according to 59% of cybersecurity professionals. This is closely followed by the exfiltration of sensitive data and insecure interfaces/APIs (tied at 51%), and unauthorized access (49%).
Hijacking of accounts, services, or traffic 45% | External sharing of data 39% | Malicious insiders 38% | Malware/ransomware 37% | Foreign state-sponsored cyberattacks 37% | Denial of service attacks 31% | Cloud cryptojacking 21% | Theft of service 20% | Lost mobile devices 13% | Don’t know/other 7%
Key Priorities for Cloud Security
CLOUD BUDGET
Despite macroeconomic headwinds and a slowdown in workloads moving to the cloud compared to years past, most organizations (60%) will see a boost in their cloud security budget this year. That boost is expected to be a 33% increase in spending power year-over-year.
CLOUD SECURITY PRIORITIES
Security professionals are using their cloud budgets wisely to address the threats and concerns that pose the biggest risk to the business. It may be no surprise that preventing misconfiguration is the number one priority (51%), but securing applications that have already moved to the cloud is a close second (48%).
Cloud security training 12% | Securing mobile devices 7% | Discovering unsanctioned cloud apps in use 7% | Securing BYOD (bring your own device) 5% | Securing less popular cloud apps already in use 4%
KEY DRIVERS FOR CLOUD-BASED SECURITY
The cloud allows organizations to get the same advantages for their security services as they have for their applications and workloads. This includes better scalability (56%), faster time to deployment (48%), reduced effort around patches and upgrades of software (43%), and cost savings (40%).
Better visibility into user activity and system behavior 38% | Better uptime 36% | Easier policy management 35% | Meet cloud compliance expectations 35% | Better performance 35% | Need for secure app access from any location 34% | Our data/workloads reside in the cloud (or are moving to the cloud) 30% | Reduction of appliance footprint in branch offices 29% | Other 3%
SINGLE CLOUD SECURITY PLATFORM
In light of the challenges regarding security visibility and lack of cyber talent, it comes as no surprise that the vast majority of respondents (90%) consider it moderately to extremely helpful to have a single cloud security platform and dashboard to protect data consistently and comprehensively across their cloud footprint.
METHODOLOGY & DEMOGRAPHICS
The 2023 Cloud Security Report is based on a comprehensive global survey of 752 cybersecurity professionals conducted in February 2023, to uncover how cloud user organizations are adopting the cloud, how they see cloud security evolving, and what best practices IT cybersecurity leaders are prioritizing in their move to the cloud. The respondents range from technical executives to IT security practitioners, representing a balanced cross-section of organizations of varying sizes across multiple industries.
Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) secures the largest enterprises, services providers, and government organizations around the world. Fortinet empowers our customers with complete visibility and control across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on
ever-increasing performance requirements today and into the future. Only the Fortinet Security Fabric platform can address the most critical security challenges and protect data across the entire digital infrastructure, whether in networks, application, multi-cloud, or edge environments. Fortinet ranks #1 as the company with the
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