Cloud adoption lies at the heart of digital transformation, providing organisations with the agility and flexibility they need to stay competitive in today’s rapidly changing marketplace. Competing in a digital-first economy requires developing personalised customer experiences, embracing a more prominent work-from-anywhere (WFA) strategy, streamlining workflows, and optimising distributed operations for greater efficiency and scalability.
However, while the power of the cloud certainly enables enterprises to quickly adapt to today’s evolving demands, it also introduces unique challenges that security teams must recognise and manage. These include safeguarding sensitive data, ensuring regulatory compliance, and maintaining visibility and control across increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The release of the 2025 State of Cloud Security Report, sponsored by Fortinet and produced by Cybersecurity Insiders, provides a comprehensive analysis of the latest trends, challenges, and strategies shaping cloud security. Based on insights from over 800 cybersecurity professionals across industries and geographies, this report reveals what is driving hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, the evolving challenges organisations face, and actionable steps for securing these dynamic environments.
Many organisations navigating the challenges of cloud adoption recognise the importance of safeguarding their cloud-based initiatives. As a result, they are significantly increasing their cloud security investments in the coming year. They are channelling their resources to address critical security gaps, ensure compliance, and overcome technical complexities.
This article examines some key findings from the report, including how businesses worldwide are harnessing the cloud and how their security teams respond to cloud-related threats. It highlights the challenges companies face as they navigate their cloud adoption journey.
Hybrid and multi-cloud dominate
Cloud adoption continues to redefine IT operations, with hybrid and multi-cloud models emerging as the leading strategies for most organisations. According to the report, 82% of surveyed organisations now leverage cloud environments to achieve greater scalability, flexibility, and resilience.
To that end, hybrid cloud adoption has risen to 54%, enabling organisations to integrate their on-premises systems with public cloud platforms. This approach lets organisations optimise the deployment of their applications based on their needs, striking a balance between control and compliance. For instance, IT teams can use public clouds for customer-facing applications, while keeping sensitive data safe in their private environments.
Cloud security challenges
While cloud adoption offers substantial benefits, it also brings significant security challenges, with 61% of respondents reporting that security and compliance concerns are their top barriers to cloud adoption. Misconfiguration, regulatory non-compliance, and data breaches are among the most pressing issues identified, especially as hybrid and multi-cloud environments expand. Compounding these challenges is the cybersecurity skills gap. A staggering 76% of organisations report a shortage of cloud security expertise and people resources, limiting their ability to deploy and manage comprehensive security solutions. This shortage not only underscores the need for targeted training and upskilling to bridge the gap, but also to rethink cloud deployment strategies to reduce complexity and increase security effectiveness.
This is even more critical when considering another critical weakness highlighted by the 2025 Cloud Security Report: real-time threat detection. Only 36% of respondents expressed confidence in their organisation’s ability to detect and respond to threats in their cloud environments. This lack of confidence highlights vulnerabilities in current architectures, especially in complex hybrid and multi-cloud setups.
Unified cloud security platforms
The State of Cloud Security Report emphasises implementing a unified cloud security platform strategy to tackle these challenges. An overwhelming 97% of respondents prefer centralised solutions that simplify policy management, enhance visibility, and ensure consistent enforcement across diverse environments.
As a result, organisations are urged to invest in acquiring and deploying a unified cloud platform. An ideal platform, like that offered by Fortinet, should deliver comprehensive 360-degree defence-in-depth protection and comprehensive visibility to help organisations fully understand their cloud environment, better operationalise their environment, and increase security effectiveness—all while reducing complexity.
Additionally, it should offer integrated capabilities like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Code Security, and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management, such as those provided in Fortinet’s Lacework FortiCNAPP Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) solution. While traditional stand-alone CSPM tools can identify misconfigurations, such as exposed storage buckets, they lack the ability to actively protect or provide the full visibility and context to amplify weak signals to identify complex threats that may exist within the cloud environment.
Increasing investment in cloud security
On average, cloud security currently accounts for 35% of overall IT security spending, reflecting the growing importance of protecting hybrid and multi-cloud environments, but with cloud security now a top priority for organisations, 63% plan to increase their budgets in the next 12 months.
Organisations should evaluate their approaches to cloud security investments, particularly those with ‘cloud minimum spend’ commitment obligations. They should consider flexible daily-usage licencing programmes that offer a broad catalogue of solutions, empowering them to readily deploy what they need, quickly scale up, down, in, or out as required, and only pay for actual usage. Additionally, an ideal programme should readily allow you to draw down your cloud spend commitment obligations at the same time.
Building a resilient cloud security posture
The report underscores the growing complexity of today’s hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and the urgent need for proactive strategies to address their evolving challenges. Critical steps include:
• Adopting unified platforms to simplify policy management and ensure consistency across environments.
• Investing in training to bridge the cybersecurity skills gap.
• Leveraging a cloud-native application protection platform that combines advanced tools like workload protection, configuration management, runtime defence to secure containers, and integrated solutions to enhance threat detection and remediate issues.
• Using end-to-end encryption and automated risk remediation to improve data protection.
In addition, emerging trends—like the integration of AI-driven threat detection, the rise of edge computing, and the increasing emphasis on zero-trust architectures—are set to shape the next wave of cloud security solutions.
Download the report at www.fortinet.com/resources/reports/cloud-security
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