Cloud security still a key concern for cybersecurity professionals: Report

Bengaluru: Cloud security continues to be a key concern for cybersecurity professionals with 96% of the respondents in a survey saying they were "moderately concerned" and a third of them being "extremely concerned", according to the Cloud Security Report 2021 by Fortinet.

The misconfiguration of cloud security remains the biggest security risk, according to 67% of cybersecurity professionals in Fortinet’s survey. This is followed by the exfiltration of sensitive data (59%).

Most organizations are pursuing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy (71%) for integration of multiple services, scalability, or business continuity reasons. Few companies rely on a single cloud deployment (27%) for their business needs. At least 76% are utilizing two or more cloud providers.

Survey participants also mentioned several barriers to faster cloud adoption. Among them were lack of visibility (53%), lack of control (46%), lack of staff resources or expertise (39%), and high cost (35%).

Currently, 33% of organizations are running more than 50% of their workload through cloud services, and this is expected to grow to 56% in the next 12-18 months.

Among the organizations surveyed, Microsoft Azure is the most popular cloud provider (73%) followed by Amazon Web Services (70%) and Google Cloud Platform (37%).