Cloud adoption has become nearly ubiquitous in the business world, with many enterprise organizations storing company an user data in cloud environments. However, 81% of organizations have experienced a cloud-related security incident over the last 12 months, with almost half (45%) suffering at least four incidents.

Research from Venafi and conducted by Sapio evaluated the opinions of over 1,100 security decision-makers to determine the complexity of cloud environments and its impact on cybersecurity. The study found that the underlying issue for these security incidents is the dramatic increase in security and operational complexity connected with cloud deployments. And, since the organizations in this study currently host two fifths (41%) of their applications in the cloud but expect increase to 57% over the next 18 months, this complexity will continue to increase, according to the report.

More than half (51%) of the security leaders in the study believe security risks are higher in the cloud than on premises, citing several issues that contribute to those risks. The most common cloud-related security incidents respondents have experienced are: 

• Security incidents during runtime (34%)
• Unauthorized access (33%)
• Misconfigurations (32%) 
• Major vulnerabilities that have not been remediated (24%)
• A failed audit (19%)

For more information about this research, click here.