Report: 63% of IT pros say cyberthreats are top obstacle to cloud adoption strategy

According to a new report by Confluera, while the vast majority of IT security professionals experienced an increase in their workload last year, the leading cause for this was the accelerated adoption of cloud infrastructures coupled with continued high rates of cyberattacks. Survey results also suggest that the adoption of cloud services is the leading cause of security concerns for IT security professionals.

According to Confluera, 66% of IT professionals surveyed said that cloud adoption is the biggest contributor to the increase in their IT security workload. As organizations changed their strategy in 2021 to support prolonged or permanent support of remote and virtual workforces, the adoption of cloud services greatly accelerated.

The overwhelming majority (97%) of IT security professionals responding to the survey confirmed that their cloud strategy includes the expansion of cloud deployments. Not only is cloud deployment expanding in scale, but it’s also expanding across platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. The results are consistent with the growing trend of adopting multi-cloud services to support the diverse needs of the organization.

IT professionals identified cybersecurity concerns as the main challenge for general cloud as well as multicloud adoption. Approximately 63% of IT professionals named cyberthreats that are designed to target cloud services as the top obstacle to cloud adoption. Similarly, 69% of IT professionals identified the need for consistent security coverage across all cloud infrastructures as the biggest barrier to multicloud adoption.

As organizations accelerate their cloud adoption and expand their strategies to include multicloud, cybersecurity exposure can, and will, throw a monkey wrench into their plans. Layer on top the ever-increasing investigation of false alerts and the resulting alert fatigue, and organizations can easily find themselves with the need to continually innovate yet be unable to do so due to the security implications.

In December 2021, Confluera commissioned an independent research firm to survey 200 U.S. IT professionals using a national network of verified panel providers. The margin of error for this study is +/-5.9% at the 95% confidence level.

Read the full report by Confluera.