The 2026 Cloud Security Report from Cybersecurity Insiders, produced in collaboration with Fortinet, finds that 69% of organizations cite tool sprawl and visibility gaps as the top factor limiting cloud security effectiveness. Based on a survey of 1,163 IT and cybersecurity professionals, the report shows the strain: 66% lack strong confidence in their ability to detect and respond to cloud threats in real time, up from 64% last year.
Together, these findings point to a widening cloud complexity gap. Cloud environments keep growing more distributed and dynamic, while many security teams still rely on point tools and disconnected telemetry. At the same time, attackers increasingly use automation to find and chain exposures faster than teams can connect the signals, making it harder to prioritize risk and respond in real time.
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“Security teams are not short on alerts or tools; they are short on connected context,” said Holger Schulze, founder of Cybersecurity Insiders. “When signals are scattered across consoles, teams spend their time piecing together what happened, instead of responding to what is happening now. Cloud security investments need to reduce that manual work and help teams act before exposure turns into compromise.”
Key findings from the report include:
- Fragmentation is the bottleneck. 69% of organizations cite tool sprawl and visibility gaps as the top factor limiting cloud security effectiveness. With 88% of organizations now operating across hybrid or multi-cloud environments, risk signals are increasingly scattered across disconnected tools, consoles, and telemetry sources, limiting the shared context teams need to prioritize and respond.
- Spending is rising, but maturity is lagging. Cloud security now accounts for an average of 34% of IT security budgets, and 62% of organizations expect cloud security budgets to increase over the next 12 months. Yet 59% still rate their cloud security posture at lower maturity stages, showing that capability gains continue to trail spending.
- Automation remains mostly alert-driven. Only 11% of organizations report fully autonomous remediation workflows, while 37% rely on basic automation that generates alerts and recommendations. AI-driven detection is still early, just 18% have it fully operational across their environments.
Security leaders are responding by reassessing their architectures. Asked how they would build their cloud security strategy if starting fresh today, 64% said they would choose a single-vendor platform that unifies network, cloud, and application security, compared with 27% that would continue with a best-of-breed approach using disparate point tools. The findings point toward unified security architectures that consolidate visibility, connect telemetry, create shared risk context, and help teams act before exposure turns into compromise.
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