The massive shift to a more distributed work environment and adoption of cloud services to support new business models over the past two years has impacted how enterprises assess cyber-risk and manage cloud vulnerabilities. Respondents to Dark Reading’s 2021 Strategic Security Survey say the shift away from on-premises infrastructures has significantly raise d the level of cyber-risk associated with cloud services.

When it comes to assessing risk, enterprises may be feeling more optimistic. In the 2020 survey, 31% of respondents said assessing risk was among the biggest information security challenge facing the organization. That figure drops to 24% in the 2021 survey. Similarly, 49% in 2020 named managing complexity as among the biggest challenge, while just 35% say so in the 2021 report.

The survey revealed substantial concern over cloud-related risks, as 24% of respondents say cloud data protection was one of the top information security challenges. For 15%, developing an effective security capability for remote access was one of the top challenges, reflecting the organization’s need to support a larger number of employees requiring remote or hybrid access to enterprise applications and data. The survey also delves into respondents’ concerns about the ability of cloud providers to detect a data breach, the increasing number of exploits targeted at cloud providers, and the growing number of intrusions into cloud environments.