Corporate security teams face an escalating crisis as the complexity of multi-cloud environments outstrips their ability to defend them, according to new research that exposes a widening gap between cloud adoption and effective security implementation. Despite rising security budgets, two-thirds of organizations report lacking confidence in their cloud security posture, raising urgent questions about the sustainability of current defense strategies.

The 2026 Cloud Security Report from Fortinet, detailed by Virtualization Review, surveyed cybersecurity professionals worldwide and found that 66% of organizations lack confidence in their cloud security capabilities. This troubling statistic comes at a time when multi-cloud deployments have become the de facto standard for enterprise IT operations, with organizations now managing workloads across an average of multiple cloud service providers simultaneously.

The confidence deficit stems from several interconnected challenges. Organizations report struggling with visibility across disparate cloud platforms, inconsistent security policy enforcement, and a shortage of personnel with specialized cloud security expertise. These issues compound as companies expand their cloud footprints, creating what security experts describe as an exponentially growing attack surface that traditional security tools were never designed to protect.

Budget Increases Fail to Match Growing Threat Complexity

While cloud security spending continues to climb, the investment appears insufficient to address the scale of the challenge. Organizations are increasing their cloud security budgets by an average of 15-20% annually, yet the complexity of securing multi-cloud environments is growing at a faster rate. The disparity suggests that throwing money at the problem without fundamental changes to security architecture and strategy will not bridge the confidence gap.

The report highlights that organizations are grappling with an average of 30 different security tools across their cloud environments, creating what industry insiders call “tool sprawl.” This fragmentation makes it difficult for security teams to maintain a cohesive view of their security posture and respond quickly to emerging threats. The proliferation of point solutions, each requiring specialized knowledge and management, further strains already overburdened security operations centers.

Multi-Cloud Adoption Creates Unprecedented Visibility Challenges

The shift to multi-cloud architectures has introduced visibility problems that previous generations of security professionals never encountered. Each cloud provider offers different native security tools, logging formats, and monitoring capabilities, making it extraordinarily difficult to achieve consistent visibility across the entire infrastructure. Security teams report spending up to 40% of their time simply trying to understand what assets exist in their cloud environments and how they are configured.

This visibility gap has real consequences. Misconfigured cloud resources remain the leading cause of cloud security breaches, and organizations often discover these misconfigurations only after they have been exploited. The report indicates that 45% of organizations have experienced a cloud security incident in the past year, with misconfiguration being the root cause in more than half of these cases. The time between misconfiguration and discovery averages 30 days, providing attackers with a substantial window of opportunity.

Compliance Requirements Add Additional Pressure

Regulatory compliance requirements are adding another layer of complexity to cloud security management. Organizations must now navigate an increasingly complex web of data protection regulations that vary by jurisdiction and industry. The challenge becomes exponentially more difficult in multi-cloud environments where data may move between different providers and geographic regions, potentially triggering multiple compliance frameworks simultaneously.

Security teams report that maintaining compliance across multi-cloud environments requires significant manual effort, with many organizations employing dedicated compliance personnel to track and document their cloud security controls. This manual approach is both expensive and error-prone, yet many organizations lack the automation capabilities needed to streamline compliance management. The result is a situation where organizations are simultaneously spending more on compliance while feeling less confident in their ability to meet regulatory requirements.

Skills Gap Intensifies as Cloud Technologies Evolve

The shortage of qualified cloud security professionals represents perhaps the most intractable challenge facing organizations. The report found that 55% of organizations cite the skills gap as their primary cloud security concern, surpassing even budget constraints. The problem is compounded by the rapid evolution of cloud technologies, which requires continuous learning and adaptation from security teams.

Traditional security expertise does not translate directly to cloud security, requiring professionals to develop entirely new skill sets. Understanding concepts like container security, serverless computing security, and cloud-native application protection requires specialized knowledge that is in high demand and short supply. Organizations report difficulty not only in hiring qualified cloud security professionals but also in retaining them, as competition for these skills drives rapid turnover.

Automation Emerges as Partial Solution

Faced with these challenges, organizations are increasingly turning to automation and artificial intelligence to augment their security capabilities. Security automation platforms that can enforce policies consistently across multiple cloud providers are seeing rapid adoption, with 62% of organizations reporting plans to increase their investment in automated security tools over the next 12 months.

However, automation is not a panacea. Implementing effective security automation requires significant upfront investment in tool integration, policy development, and process refinement. Organizations that rush into automation without adequate planning often find themselves with automated systems that generate excessive false positives or fail to detect genuine threats. The most successful implementations combine automation with human expertise, using automated systems to handle routine tasks while reserving human judgment for complex security decisions.

Cloud-Native Security Approaches Gain Traction

A growing number of organizations are abandoning the approach of adapting traditional security tools for the cloud and instead embracing cloud-native security solutions. These platforms are designed from the ground up to work in multi-cloud environments, offering unified visibility and policy enforcement across different cloud providers. The shift represents a fundamental rethinking of cloud security architecture, moving from a perimeter-based model to one that assumes breach and focuses on limiting lateral movement and detecting anomalous behavior.

Cloud-native security platforms typically incorporate features like cloud security posture management, cloud workload protection, and cloud infrastructure entitlement management into integrated solutions. This consolidation helps address the tool sprawl problem while providing the specialized capabilities needed for cloud environments. Organizations adopting these platforms report improved visibility and faster incident response times, though implementation remains complex and time-consuming.

Identity Management Becomes Central to Cloud Security

As organizations grapple with securing their multi-cloud environments, identity and access management has emerged as a critical control point. The report indicates that 70% of cloud security incidents involve compromised credentials or excessive permissions, making identity management a top priority for security teams. The challenge is particularly acute in multi-cloud environments where users and applications may need access to resources across multiple cloud providers.

Organizations are implementing zero-trust architectures that verify every access request regardless of its origin, eliminating the implicit trust that characterized previous security models. This approach requires sophisticated identity management systems capable of enforcing granular access controls across heterogeneous cloud environments. While conceptually straightforward, implementing zero-trust in practice requires significant changes to both technology and organizational processes, creating barriers to adoption for many organizations.

Future Outlook Demands Strategic Rethinking

The findings suggest that incremental improvements to existing security approaches will prove insufficient as cloud complexity continues to grow. Organizations must fundamentally rethink their security strategies, moving beyond reactive measures to proactive security architecture that anticipates the challenges of increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. This requires executive-level commitment and cross-functional collaboration that extends beyond traditional security teams.

Industry experts recommend that organizations focus on building sustainable security programs rather than pursuing perfect security. This means accepting that some level of risk is inevitable and focusing resources on protecting the most critical assets and detecting breaches quickly when they occur. It also requires honest assessment of organizational capabilities and willingness to acknowledge gaps that cannot be addressed with current resources or expertise. As multi-cloud adoption continues its inexorable advance, organizations that fail to address these fundamental challenges will find themselves increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated attacks that exploit the complexity they have created.