The 2026 Fortinet Cloud Security Report reveals a troubling reality: as companies race to adopt cloud technologies, their security defenses are falling dangerously behind. Based on a survey of 1,163 cybersecurity leaders worldwide, the findings expose what researchers call the “cloud complexity gap”—a widening chasm between how fast cloud environments evolve and how effectively security teams can protect them.
The Multi-Cloud Maze
Today’s businesses aren’t just using one cloud provider. A staggering 88% now operate across hybrid or multi-cloud environments, with 81% relying on two or more cloud providers for critical operations. While this approach offers flexibility, it creates a fragmented security landscape where every new service, identity, and data path becomes another potential vulnerability.
The Confidence Crisis
Perhaps most alarming: 66% of organizations lack strong confidence in their ability to detect and respond to cloud threats in real time—an increase from 64% the previous year. This isn’t improving despite rising budgets. Companies now allocate 34% of their IT security spending to cloud protection, yet 59% still rate their cloud security maturity as initial or developing.
Where Security Breaks Down
The report identifies tool sprawl as the primary villain. Sixty-nine percent of organizations cite disconnected security tools and visibility gaps as their biggest obstacle. Instead of working together, these systems operate in silos, forcing security teams to manually piece together threat intelligence across multiple dashboards—a time-consuming process that often misses critical connections.
Adding to the challenge, 74% of organizations report acute cybersecurity talent shortages. Understaffed teams spend more time navigating fragmented tools than actually stopping threats, creating a reactive security posture where some signals inevitably slip through the cracks.
The Risk Trifecta
Three areas dominate security concerns: identity and access (77%), misconfigured cloud services (70%), and data exposure (66%). These aren’t isolated risks—they form what the report calls an “exposure chain.” A misconfiguration might seem minor, but paired with an overprivileged account and sensitive customer data, it becomes a direct path to breach.
The Automation Illusion
While most organizations have introduced automation, there’s a critical gap between alerting and action. Only 11% have autonomous remediation capabilities. The majority rely on automation that simply flags problems, leaving overwhelmed teams to manually investigate and fix issues while attackers operate at machine speed using AI-powered tools.
The Platform Awakening
Faced with these challenges, 64% of organizations say they’d choose a single, unified security platform if they could start over, rather than managing multiple specialized tools. This represents a fundamental shift in thinking—from collecting best-of-breed point solutions to demanding integrated systems that share context and coordinate responses across environments.
What Works
Organizations making progress share common approaches: establishing unified visibility as a baseline requirement, reducing tool fragmentation, assessing identity and configuration risks together rather than separately, focusing automation on resolving issues (not just flagging them), and integrating cloud security with broader network and endpoint defenses.
The message is clear: throwing money at disconnected tools won’t close the security gap. Success requires rethinking cloud security as an integrated operating model rather than a collection of isolated capabilities.
