Navigating Today’s Cloud Security Challenges

Cloud adoption is a cornerstone of digital transformation, equipping organizations with the agility and flexibility needed to thrive in today’s fast-paced, ever-evolving marketplace. Succeeding in a digital-first economy requires businesses to craft personalized customer experiences, adopt robust hybrid workforce strategies, streamline workflows, and optimize distributed operations for greater efficiency and scalability.

 While the cloud’s transformative capabilities empower enterprises to adapt swiftly to modern demands, its adoption also brings distinct challenges that security teams must address. These challenges include safeguarding sensitive data, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and maintaining visibility and control over increasingly intricate hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

The 2025 State of Cloud Security Report, sponsored by Fortinet and developed by Cybersecurity Insiders, offers an in-depth exploration of the latest trends, challenges, and strategies in cloud security. Drawing on feedback from more than 800 cybersecurity professionals spanning various industries and regions, the report sheds light on the drivers behind hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, the evolving obstacles faced by organizations, and actionable measures to secure these dynamic ecosystems.

As they navigate cloud adoption hurdles, many organizations are recognizing the crucial need to protect their cloud-based initiatives. Consequently, they are ramping up investments in cloud security for the year ahead. Their focus is on addressing critical vulnerabilities, ensuring compliance, and overcoming technical complexities to reinforce their overall security posture.

 This blog delves into the key insights from the 2025 State of Cloud Security Report, exploring how organizations across the globe are embracing cloud technologies and how their security teams are tackling emerging threats. It also underscores the challenges businesses encounter on their journey toward effective cloud integration.

Cloud Adoption Trends: 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 organizations. According to the report, 82% of surveyed organizations now leverage cloud environments to achieve greater scalability, flexibility, and resilience.

To that end, hybrid cloud adoption has risen to 54%, enabling organizations to integrate their on-premises systems with public cloud platforms. This approach lets organizations optimize 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. Misconfigurations, regulatory noncompliance, and data breaches are among the most pressing issues identified, especially as hybrid and multi-cloud environments expand. For instance, healthcare providers migrating patient records to the cloud must comply with HIPAA regulations while safeguarding sensitive information.

Compounding these challenges is the cybersecurity skills gap. A staggering 76% of organizations report a shortage of cloud security expertise and people resources, limiting their ability to deploy and manage comprehensive security solutions. This shortage underscores the need for targeted training and upskilling to bridge the gap and rethink cloud deployment strategies to reduce complexity and increase security effectiveness. 

This is even more critical when considering another weakness highlighted by the 2025 Cloud Security Report: real-time threat detection. Only 36% of respondents expressed confidence in their organization’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: A Key Solution

The 2025 State of Cloud Security Report emphasizes implementing a unified cloud security platform strategy to tackle these challenges. An overwhelming 97% of respondents prefer centralized solutions that simplify policy management, enhance visibility, and ensure consistent enforcement across diverse environments.

As a result, organizations are urged to invest in acquiring and deploying a unified cloud platform. Like that offered by Fortinet, an ideal platform should deliver comprehensive 360-degree defense-in-depth protection and comprehensive visibility to help organizations fully understand their cloud environment, better operationalize 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 the Fortinet Lacework FortiCNAPP cloud-native application protection platform solution. While traditional standalone CSPM tools can identify misconfigurations, such as exposed storage buckets, they cannot 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 organizations, 63% plan to increase their budgets in the next 12 months.

Organizations should evaluate their approaches to cloud security investments, particularly those with cloud minimum spend commitment obligations. They should consider flexible daily usage licensing programs, such as Fortinet FortiFlex, that offer a broad catalog 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 program should readily allow you to draw down your cloud spend commitment obligations at the same time.  

Building a Resilient Cloud Security Posture

The 2025 State of Cloud Security 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 CNAPP platform that combines advanced tools like workload protection, configuration management, runtime defense 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.

The time to prepare for these changes is now. Fortinet’s industry-leading solutions provide the tools and insights today’s organizations need to protect their cloud infrastructures effectively. By implementing the best practices outlined in this report, you can build a more resilient security posture designed to support your innovation while protecting the critical assets you have deployed across your dynamic cloud landscape.