Ermetic, cloud access risk security company, announced the results of a research study conducted by global intelligence firm IDC which found that nearly 80% of the companies surveyed had experienced at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months, and nearly half (43%) reported 10 or more breaches. 

According to the 300 CISOs that participated in the survey, security misconfiguration (67%), lack of adequate visibility into access settings and activities (64%) and identity and access management (IAM) permission errors (61%) were their top concerns associated with cloud production environments. Meanwhile, 80% reported they are unable to identify excessive access to sensitive data in IaaS/PaaS environments. In the recent 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, only hacking ranked higher than misconfiguration errors as a source of data breaches.