2021 Thales Cloud Security Study

About this study

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated what has been a long-term broad adoption of cloud environments, including multicloud and hybrid deployments. The benefits of cloud come with significant new security challenges for organizations. The 2021 Thales Cloud Security Study, based on data from a global survey of more than 2,600 IT and security professionals, delves into cloud security trends so that readers can align the research findings to their own practices as they consider their cloud migration and implementation efforts.

Introduction

As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that the technology sector in general – and cloud adoption in particular – has been instrumental in helping the world cope with the enormity of the task. It has provided the advanced medical research at various stages; helped instrument public health, officials, and the general public, and provided the foundation of ongoing commerce, communication and entertainment.

For those looking into cloud adoption, the pandemic merely accelerated what has been a long-term broad adoption of cloud environments, including multicloud and hybrid deployments. There are numerous benefits to this adoption: faster time to value and time to market, as well as the ability to experiment and quickly leverage elasticity and resiliency. That said, the benefits of cloud come with significant new security challenges for organizations. They need to understand how responsibilities are shared between provider and customer, how the threat models change, how internal stakeholders respond to cloud, and much more.

Throughout all this, it’s useful to get a sense of how others are handling these issues. Just how widespread is multicloud? What are the operational challenges of managing security across multiple clouds? Is all this cloud transformation as hard as it seems? How do I secure data in cloud? This report delves into these and other trends in cloud security. The report presents findings that come from a global survey of more than 2,600 respondents, spread across industries, organization sizes and job functions. Please refer to the Methodology section for more detail.

The intent is for readers of this report to benefit from aligning the research findings to their own practices as they consider their cloud migration and implementation efforts.