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Managing Cloud Sovereignty and Security in a Multi-Cloud World

Todd Moore
Thales

In 2023, cloud computing has become commonplace across tech and non-tech organizations around the world. Over the past two years, it has cut out the middleman — expensive local infrastructure needed for computer applications — and has accelerated the growth of some of the most significant recent technological advances, including driving major improvements in artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and remote and hybrid working.

But are organizations prepared for public clouds?


According to the 2023 Thales Cloud Security Study, which surveyed nearly 3000 respondents across 18 countries, over three-quarters of respondents now rely on more than one cloud provider. The average organization uses 2.26 infrastructure providers, a 35% increase since 2021. In 2021, 16% of respondents' organizations used 51-100 SaaS applications; by 2023, this percentage increased to 22% for 97 average SaaS applications.

So what's the problem?

Multi-cloud adoption is becoming increasingly complex — and most organizations are failing to keep up.

Cloud complexity

Multicloud adoption has brought operational complexity, making the management and security of data in the cloud more difficult. Between 2021–2023, the number of respondents feeling the effects of this complexity arose from 46% to 55%.

This makes more sense when you consider the way organizations choose to store encryption keys. Only 14% of respondents said they controlled all their encryption keys in their cloud environment, while nearly two-thirds said they used five or more key management systems, which is difficult to believe from a complexity perspective. It's no wonder organizations are struggling to keep track of their data.

Cloud data concerns

There is more data stored in the cloud than ever. However, more interesting is how much more sensitive data organizations are storing in the cloud. Three-quarters of respondents report that 40% of their data is sensitive, a 16% increase since 2021.

However, many organizations still aren't giving cloud security the necessary attention. Less than half of their overall cloud data is encrypted, and only 22% of respondents reported that more than 60% of their cloud data is encrypted. It's undeniable that organizations need to improve their cloud security.

The cloud threat landscape

The cloud threat landscape is not immune to today's cybersecurity concerns. The number of organizations that experienced a breach in the past grew 4% from 2021 (35%) to now (39%). Even more concerning, nearly half of respondents said they had experienced a data breach in their cloud environment.

Data sovereignty challenges

Cloud data sovereignty is the concept that data stored in the cloud is subject to the laws and regulations of the country or other jurisdiction. While data sovereignty represents an opportunity for organizations to undergo digital transformation, it also brings significant cloud security challenges. More than 80% of respondents said they were "somewhat" or "very" concerned about data sovereignty impacts on their cloud deployments.

Looking Forward

Organizations shifting to cloud computing must move away from complexity and embrace easy-to-manage cloud services and data protection. It is also imperative that they account for the human factor, i.e., human errors and misconfigurations that risk cloud and company security. The cloud is an extension of your infrastructure and must be treated this way if organizations intend to optimize its security and value. As companies use more cloud services and store more sensitive data in the cloud, they will gain operational and financial advantages and thrive in a competitive market.

Todd Moore is VP Data Security Products at Thales

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Managing Cloud Sovereignty and Security in a Multi-Cloud World

Todd Moore
Thales

In 2023, cloud computing has become commonplace across tech and non-tech organizations around the world. Over the past two years, it has cut out the middleman — expensive local infrastructure needed for computer applications — and has accelerated the growth of some of the most significant recent technological advances, including driving major improvements in artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and remote and hybrid working.

But are organizations prepared for public clouds?


According to the 2023 Thales Cloud Security Study, which surveyed nearly 3000 respondents across 18 countries, over three-quarters of respondents now rely on more than one cloud provider. The average organization uses 2.26 infrastructure providers, a 35% increase since 2021. In 2021, 16% of respondents' organizations used 51-100 SaaS applications; by 2023, this percentage increased to 22% for 97 average SaaS applications.

So what's the problem?

Multi-cloud adoption is becoming increasingly complex — and most organizations are failing to keep up.

Cloud complexity

Multicloud adoption has brought operational complexity, making the management and security of data in the cloud more difficult. Between 2021–2023, the number of respondents feeling the effects of this complexity arose from 46% to 55%.

This makes more sense when you consider the way organizations choose to store encryption keys. Only 14% of respondents said they controlled all their encryption keys in their cloud environment, while nearly two-thirds said they used five or more key management systems, which is difficult to believe from a complexity perspective. It's no wonder organizations are struggling to keep track of their data.

Cloud data concerns

There is more data stored in the cloud than ever. However, more interesting is how much more sensitive data organizations are storing in the cloud. Three-quarters of respondents report that 40% of their data is sensitive, a 16% increase since 2021.

However, many organizations still aren't giving cloud security the necessary attention. Less than half of their overall cloud data is encrypted, and only 22% of respondents reported that more than 60% of their cloud data is encrypted. It's undeniable that organizations need to improve their cloud security.

The cloud threat landscape

The cloud threat landscape is not immune to today's cybersecurity concerns. The number of organizations that experienced a breach in the past grew 4% from 2021 (35%) to now (39%). Even more concerning, nearly half of respondents said they had experienced a data breach in their cloud environment.

Data sovereignty challenges

Cloud data sovereignty is the concept that data stored in the cloud is subject to the laws and regulations of the country or other jurisdiction. While data sovereignty represents an opportunity for organizations to undergo digital transformation, it also brings significant cloud security challenges. More than 80% of respondents said they were "somewhat" or "very" concerned about data sovereignty impacts on their cloud deployments.

Looking Forward

Organizations shifting to cloud computing must move away from complexity and embrace easy-to-manage cloud services and data protection. It is also imperative that they account for the human factor, i.e., human errors and misconfigurations that risk cloud and company security. The cloud is an extension of your infrastructure and must be treated this way if organizations intend to optimize its security and value. As companies use more cloud services and store more sensitive data in the cloud, they will gain operational and financial advantages and thrive in a competitive market.

Todd Moore is VP Data Security Products at Thales

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...