76% of respondents said that attack volumes had increased, with the majority pointing to employees working from home as the cause. Additionally, 79% said attacks had become more sophisticated. Cloud-based attacks were the most frequently experienced attack type in the past year, whereas the leading breach causes were third-party apps (14%) and ransomware (14%). The three top vectors that cause breaches of third-party apps, ransomware, and out-of-date security tech and process weaknesses build a strong picture of external threats and internal weaknesses.

98% of respondents already use or plan to use a cloud-first security strategy, but the move to cloud has expanded the threat surface. Nearly two thirds of correspondents (61%) agree they need to view security differently now that the attack surface has expanded. 43% of respondents said they plan to build more security into their infrastructure and apps and reduce the number of point solutions. 46% of cloud adoption correspondents say they have been using a cloud-first approach for more than one year, while 30% say they have been cloud-first for less than 12 months.

81% of respondents have suffered a breach in the last twelve months with 4 out of 5 breaches (82%) considering material requiring reporting to regulators or, potentially, including the involvement of an incident response team. Only 56% say they fear a material breach in the next year, and just over one-third (41%) have updated their security policy and approach to mitigate the risk. The number of breaches has risen, with respondents who had a cyber-attack reporting 2.35 breaches on average per year.

Applications and workloads are viewed as the most vulnerable points on the data journey. 63% of respondents agree they need better visibility over data and apps in order to pre-empt attacks. 60% of respondents also shared that their senior leadership team feel increasingly worried about bringing new applications to market because of the growing threat and damage of cyberattacks. However, the positive is that nearly two-thirds agree they need to view security differently than they have previously as the attack surface has expanded.

The next frontier for business innovation may be artificial intelligence, but more than half of respondents worldwide (56 percent) agree security concerns are holding them back from embracing AI/ML based apps to improve such services. Where 63% of respondents agree that their ability to innovate depends on their building and getting apps into the hands of employees and customers more securely. Meaning most of the respondents just feel they're unable to respond to the digital opportunity.