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Cloud Security Alliance Releases Latest Survey Report on State of Cloud Security Concerns, Challenges, and Incidents

Survey finds that 58% of respondents are concerned about security in the cloud, while misconfigurations are one of the leading causes of breaches and outages as public cloud adoption doubles over past two years

March 30, 2021



SEATTLE – March 30, 2021 – The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, and AlgoSec, a leading provider of business-driven network and cloud security management solutions, today announced the results of a new study titled, “State of Cloud Security Concerns, Challenges, and Incidents.” The survey, which queried nearly 1,900 IT and security professionals from a variety of organization sizes and locations, sought to gain deeper insight into the complex cloud environment that continues to emerge and that has only grown more complex since the onset of the pandemic.

The survey found that over half of organizations are running 41 percent or more of their workloads in public clouds, compared to just one-quarter in 2019. In 2021, 63 percent of respondents expect to be running 41 percent or more of their workloads in public cloud, indicating that adoption of public cloud will only continue. Sixty-two percent of respondents use more than one cloud provider, and the diversity of production workloads (e.g. container platforms, virtual machines) is also expected to increase.

Key findings include:

“The use of cloud services has continued to increase over the past decade. Particularly now, in the wake of the COVID-19 public health crisis. With organizations struggling to address a largely remote workforce, many enterprises’ digital transformations have been accelerated to enable employees to work from home,” said Hillary Baron, lead author and research analyst, Cloud Security Alliance. “As an ever-more complex cloud environment continues to evolve, the need for supplementary security tools to improve public cloud security will, as well.”

“In the face of complex environments, a dearth of security staff, and an overall lack of cloud knowledge, organizations are turning to security tools that can help supplement their workforce. Three of the top four benefits organizations look for in security management tools involve proactive detection of risks and automation. These types of tools can supplement the challenges many organizations are experiencing with lack of expertise (47%) and staff (32%), as well as improve visibility as they move toward an ever-changing cloud environment,” said Jade Kahn, AlgoSec Chief Marketing Officer.
AlgoSec commissioned the survey to add to the industry’s knowledge about hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud security. Sponsors of CSA research are CSA Corporate Members, who support the findings of the research project but have no added influence on content development nor editing rights. The report and its findings are vendor-agnostic and allow for global participation.

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About Cloud Security Alliance
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. CSA harnesses the subject matter expertise of industry practitioners, associations, governments, and its corporate and individual members to offer cloud security-specific research, education, training, certification, events, and products. CSA’s activities, knowledge, and extensive network benefit the entire community impacted by cloud — from providers and customers to governments, entrepreneurs, and the assurance industry — and provide a forum through which different parties can work together to create and maintain a trusted cloud ecosystem. For further information, visit us at www.cloudsecurityalliance.org, and follow us on Twitter @cloudsa.

About AlgoSec
The leading provider of business-driven network security management solutions, AlgoSec helps the world’s largest organizations align security with their mission-critical business processes. With AlgoSec, users can discover, map and migrate business application connectivity, proactively analyze risk from the business perspective, tie cyber-attacks to business processes and intelligently automate network security changes with zero touch – across their cloud, SDN and on-premise networks. Over 1,800 enterprises, including 20 of the Fortune 50, have utilized AlgoSec’s solutions to make their organizations more agile, more secure and more compliant – all the time. Since 2005, AlgoSec has shown its commitment to customer satisfaction with the industry’s only money-back guarantee. www.algosec.com