- Tool dispersion and visibility gaps are preventing companies from adopting good security postures, according to a report
- About two in three agree they would prefer a unified security platform
- Consolidation and automation are two of Fortinet’s five recommendations
A new report from Fortinet has confirmed that the cloud is now considered mission-critical for most companies, as it underpins many operations and their AI strategies, but it also has its drawbacks.
For example, the cloud has greatly expanded the attack surface beyond the reach of legacy cybersecurity tools.
As a result, more than two-thirds (69%) now blame tool expansion and visibility gaps for creating cloud security barriers, and a similar number (66%) also admit they are not very confident in their ability to detect and respond to cloud threats in real time, marking an increase compared to the same data a year ago.
To further amplify the increased attack surface, 88% of organizations use hybrid or multi-cloud environments, and 81% use two or more vendors, which only increases complexity and risk.
Looking at the current state of cloud-centric security, automation primarily serves as an alerting tool and only 11% have autonomous remediation. Three in five (59%) companies rate their maturity as “early stage,” with some of the biggest risks identified in identity and access (77%), misconfigurations (70%), and data exposure (66%).
Money is clearly not the issue, because more than half (62%) expect cloud security budgets to increase compared to just 5% who expect it to decrease. In fact, a not-so-insignificant 34% of IT security budgets on average are allocated to cloud security.
What Fortinet is calling for is tool simplification: 64% agree that they would prefer a unified security platform, rather than tying together multiple tools.
Looking ahead, Fortinet offers five key principles to improve the state of multi-cloud security: establish unified visibility across all accounts, data stores and workloads; tool consolidation; connecting multiple risk domains rather than treating each element in isolation; add a layer of automation to resolve high-volume, low-risk issues; and extend security beyond the cloud to networks, SaaS and endpoints.
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