Sixty percent of information technology (IT) and security leaders are not confident in their organization’s ability to ensure secure cloud access, even as adoption continues to grow across a diverse range of cloud environments.

The Global Study on Zero Trust Security for the Cloud from Appgate and conducted by the Ponemon Institute surveyed nearly 1,500 IT decision makers and security professionals worldwide to examine the pain points they experience in securing cloud environments.

Organizations face a multitude of barriers to securing diverse cloud environments, with the top challenges cited as network monitoring/visibility (48%), in-house expertise (45%), increased attack vectors (38%) and siloed security solutions (36%). In addition, 62% of respondents say traditional perimeter-based security solutions are no longer adequate to mitigate the risk of threats like ransomware, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, insider threats and man-in-the-middle attacks.

As cloud-native development practices grow, 90% of respondents will have adopted DevOps and 87% will have adopted containers within the next three years, but modern security practices aren’t as widespread. Only 42% can confidently segment their environments and apply the principle of least privilege, and nearly a third of organizations have no collaboration between IT security and DevOps — presenting a significant risk.

Respondents that have adopted a zero trust strategy report increased productivity of the IT security team (65%), stronger authentication using identity and risk posture (61%), increased productivity for DevOps (58%) and greater network visibility and automation capabilities (58%) as the top benefits.

For more report insights, click here.