Dive Brief:

• Cybersecurity is the leading obstacle for expanded cloud and multicloud adoption, the top concern for more than two-thirds of IT leaders, according to a study released Thursday by Confluera. The company commissioned a survey of 200 IT leaders and medium and large organizations, using an independent research firm. 
• IT teams spend over half of their time investigating cybersecurity alerts, however more than half of these alerts are either false alarms or otherwise considered benign threats, according to the report. 
• The increased demand for cloud deployments due to remote work, coupled with the heightened pressure on IT security teams amid record job resignations, has led to increased fatigue and job burnout.

Dive Insight:

Organizations have raised security concerns when they expand the number of cloud deployments. The reliance on a multicloud environment, using some combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, complicates the security dynamic. 

The report shows 97% of IT leaders are expanding cloud adoption at their organizations as part of internal strategy. Meanwhile, almost 70% of respondents were concerned about consistent security coverage when operating across different cloud platforms.

2021 represented the first full year for many companies in terms of supporting a newly remote workforce, according to Confluera CEO John Morgan. Many IT security officials expected to focus on securing remote devices and insecure network connections, Morgan said. 

"The reality is that IT professionals spend the most time and are most burdened by the adoption of cloud services, which is more of a backend infrastructure," Morgan said via email.

Prior research studies illustrate the complexity of securing a remote workforce, as well as an increasing visibility gap inside of cloud infrastructures. 

A 2020 buyer survey from Gartner showed more than three-quarters of organizations were adopting a multicloud infrastructure. But different providers supporting different sets of policies makes it difficult for many companies to create a consistent security posture, an October 2021 technology trends report from Gartner shows.

"The biggest challenge around the security of multicloud for enterprises is that all cloud providers and services are not providing the same levels of maturity in their features," said Patrick Hevesi, research VP at Gartner. "Then when you factor in large numbers of cloud apps, the complexity of trying to map and secure each of them is overwhelming for the security team."