A new report from Confluera Inc. has found that information technology leaders cited cybersecurity concerns as the biggest impediment to cloud and multicloud adoption.

The 2022 Cloud Cybersecurity Survey Report polled 200 U.S. IT leaders at medium to large-sized organizations on how they’re tackling the increasingly complex remote, cloud-centric IT security landscape.

The vast majority of organizations were found to be accelerating their cloud adoption, with 97% of IT leaders surveyed stating that their strategy includes the expansion of cloud deployments. Strategies included expansion at scale and in many cases, the adoption of multiple platforms such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC Cloud and Microsoft Corp. Azure.

While the embrace of cloud services was positive, 63% of those surveyed identified cyber threats designed to target cloud services as the top obstacle to their cloud strategy.

Dealing with cyber threats in cloud environments was noted as an issue as cloud and multicloud adoption have greatly increased the workload of already burdened IT teams. Only around half of the respondents said that they are adequately staffed to manage the frequency of alerts they receive. IT teams spend 54% of their time investigating security alerts, with over half of those alerts turning out to be false or benign alarms.

Some 65% of those surveyed said that cloud infrastructure as a service adoption was the primary contributor to their increased workload in 2021. Sixty-nine percent said maintaining consistent cybersecurity coverage across all cloud infrastructures was a serious challenge, with half saying that securing the resources to manage different cloud infrastructures was also an issue.

“While accelerated cloud adoption continues to be a critical element in adapting to the new way of doing business, it has strained IT leaders’ ability to manage their workload,” John Morgan, chief executive officer of Confluera, said in a statement. “Organizations need to ensure proper people, processes, and tools are in place for the team to expand the complex cloud environments without sacrificing their attention to security.”

Not all the findings were negative, however. Some 84% of IT leaders said they were optimistic about their cybersecurity readiness for 2022. The majority of respondents noted the availability of new cybersecurity tools as the reason for their positive outlook, with 59% saying that a detection-and-response solution for the cloud is the innovation they’re most excited about for future deployment.

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