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Cyber ResilienceCloud adoption is no longer a transition phase. It is now the operating model. Fortinet’s 2026 Cloud Security Report makes that clear from the start: 88% of organizations now operate across hybrid or multi-cloud environments, and 81% rely on two or more cloud providers for critical workloads. That number has gone up again from the previous year, which tells us something important. Complexity is no longer a side effect of cloud growth. It is now standard operating reality.
Fortinet, in partnership with Cybersecurity Insiders, surveyed 1,163 senior cybersecurity professionals across industries to produce the 2026 Cloud Security Report. The central finding is blunt: enterprises are spending more on cloud security than ever before, yet most cannot detect or respond to cloud threats in real time. The report identifies this as the “cloud complexity gap”, a structural mismatch between how fast cloud environments grow and how effectively security teams can protect them.
For organizations in the Middle East and beyond, including those DTS Solution serves, this report reads less like a warning and more like a mirror.
88% Operate hybrid ormulti-cloud environments | 69% Cite tool sprawl as#1 barrier to cloud security | 66% Lack confidence inreal-time threat detection |
Multi-Cloud Is Now the Default
88% of organizations now operate across hybrid or multi-cloud environments, up from 82% the previous year. Of those, 81% rely on two or more cloud providers to run critical workloads, with 29% using more than three. Every additional provider brings its own identity system, configuration policies, telemetry, and control plane. Security teams are expected to maintain consistent visibility across all of it simultaneously.
The problem is not adoption — it is architecture. Most organizations built cloud environments incrementally: one team chose AWS, another Azure, a third added SaaS platforms. The result is a patchwork of disconnected controls with no shared context between them.
Tool Sprawl Is the Real Enemy
69% of respondents named tool sprawl and visibility gaps as the single biggest obstacle to effective cloud security. That number should stop every CISO mid-sentence. Security teams are not under-resourced in terms of tools — they are drowning in them. Posture management tools flag misconfigurations. Identity tools surface excess permissions. Data security tools classify sensitive files. None of these tools talk to each other, which means analysts spend their time manually correlating alerts across consoles rather than containing actual incidents.
This is where cloud budgets go to die. 62% of organizations plan to increase cloud security spending in the next 12 months, and cloud security already accounts for 34% of total IT security budgets. Yet 59% of organizations still rate their cloud security posture at the two lowest maturity stages. The report is unambiguous: throwing budget at disconnected tools does not produce better security outcomes.
Where the Risk Lives
Three risk categories dominate the findings on where breaches originate and where security teams lose sleep:
Risk Category | % Concerned |
Identity & Access Security | 77% |
Configuration & Posture Security | 70% |
Data Exposure & Privacy | 66% |
Workload & Runtime Security | 59% |
Third-Party & Supply Chain | 51% |
What these numbers describe is not isolated incidents; they describe a chain. A misconfigured storage bucket, combined with an overprivileged service account and a database holding customer records, creates a direct path to a breach. Each element looks manageable in isolation. Together, they become a critical exposure. 69% of organizations experienced identity-related incidents in the past 12 months, and 65% reported configuration-related events. These are not edge cases; they are the norm.
Attackers Are Faster Than Your Analysts
Only 18% of organizations have AI-driven threat detection fully operational across their cloud environments. 32% are still in pilot phase.
Meanwhile, attackers have no such delay — they use automation to scan for misconfigurations, map permission paths, and pinpoint exposed data at machine speed. The window between exposure and exploitation is shrinking. Human-paced alert triage simply cannot match this tempo.
The automation gap compounds the talent shortage. 74% of organizations report an active deficit of qualified cybersecurity professionals, and 77% are highly concerned about the industry-wide skills gap. When disconnected tools generate more alerts than a small team can process, the team defaults to reactive triage — and proactive security becomes aspirational rather than operational.
The Consolidation Shift
64% of organizations say that if they were building their security architecture from scratch today, they would choose a single-vendor platform that unifies network, cloud, and application security. Only 27% would return to a best-of-breed, point-tool approach. This is a decisive shift in how enterprise security buyers think.
When asked what they prioritize in a cloud security platform, respondents ranked coverage and depth (79%), integration and orchestration (72%), and automation with compliance (68%) above cost or ease of use. Security leaders want platforms that share context across identity, posture, data, and workload domains, not another console to manage.
Cloud adoption is no longer a transition phase. It is now the operating model. Fortinet’s 2026 Cloud Security Report makes that clear from the start: 88% of organizations now operate across hybrid or multi-cloud environments, and 81% rely on two or more cloud providers for critical workloads. That number has gone up again from the previous year, which tells us something important. Complexity is no longer a side effect of cloud growth. It is now standard operating reality.
Fortinet, in partnership with Cybersecurity Insiders, surveyed 1,163 senior cybersecurity professionals across industries to produce the 2026 Cloud Security Report. The central finding is blunt: enterprises are spending more on cloud security than ever before, yet most cannot detect or respond to cloud threats in real time. The report identifies this as the “cloud complexity gap”, a structural mismatch between how fast cloud environments grow and how effectively security teams can protect them.
For organizations in the Middle East and beyond, including those DTS Solution serves, this report reads less like a warning and more like a mirror.
88% Operate hybrid ormulti-cloud environments | 69% Cite tool sprawl as#1 barrier to cloud security | 66% Lack confidence inreal-time threat detection |
Multi-Cloud Is Now the Default
88% of organizations now operate across hybrid or multi-cloud environments, up from 82% the previous year. Of those, 81% rely on two or more cloud providers to run critical workloads, with 29% using more than three. Every additional provider brings its own identity system, configuration policies, telemetry, and control plane. Security teams are expected to maintain consistent visibility across all of it simultaneously.
The problem is not adoption — it is architecture. Most organizations built cloud environments incrementally: one team chose AWS, another Azure, a third added SaaS platforms. The result is a patchwork of disconnected controls with no shared context between them.
Tool Sprawl Is the Real Enemy
69% of respondents named tool sprawl and visibility gaps as the single biggest obstacle to effective cloud security. That number should stop every CISO mid-sentence. Security teams are not under-resourced in terms of tools — they are drowning in them. Posture management tools flag misconfigurations. Identity tools surface excess permissions. Data security tools classify sensitive files. None of these tools talk to each other, which means analysts spend their time manually correlating alerts across consoles rather than containing actual incidents.
This is where cloud budgets go to die. 62% of organizations plan to increase cloud security spending in the next 12 months, and cloud security already accounts for 34% of total IT security budgets. Yet 59% of organizations still rate their cloud security posture at the two lowest maturity stages. The report is unambiguous: throwing budget at disconnected tools does not produce better security outcomes.
Where the Risk Lives
Three risk categories dominate the findings on where breaches originate and where security teams lose sleep:
Risk Category | % Concerned |
Identity & Access Security | 77% |
Configuration & Posture Security | 70% |
Data Exposure & Privacy | 66% |
Workload & Runtime Security | 59% |
Third-Party & Supply Chain | 51% |
What these numbers describe is not isolated incidents; they describe a chain. A misconfigured storage bucket, combined with an overprivileged service account and a database holding customer records, creates a direct path to a breach. Each element looks manageable in isolation. Together, they become a critical exposure. 69% of organizations experienced identity-related incidents in the past 12 months, and 65% reported configuration-related events. These are not edge cases; they are the norm.
Attackers Are Faster Than Your Analysts
Only 18% of organizations have AI-driven threat detection fully operational across their cloud environments. 32% are still in pilot phase. Meanwhile, attackers have no such delay — they use automation to scan for misconfigurations, map permission paths, and pinpoint exposed data at machine speed. The window between exposure and exploitation is shrinking. Human-paced alert triage simply cannot match this tempo.
The automation gap compounds the talent shortage. 74% of organizations report an active deficit of qualified cybersecurity professionals, and 77% are highly concerned about the industry-wide skills gap. When disconnected tools generate more alerts than a small team can process, the team defaults to reactive triage — and proactive security becomes aspirational rather than operational.
The Consolidation Shift
64% of organizations say that if they were building their security architecture from scratch today, they would choose a single-vendor platform that unifies network, cloud, and application security. Only 27% would return to a best-of-breed, point-tool approach. This is a decisive shift in how enterprise security buyers think.
When asked what they prioritize in a cloud security platform, respondents ranked coverage and depth (79%), integration and orchestration (72%), and automation with compliance (68%) above cost or ease of use. Security leaders want platforms that share context across identity, posture, data, and workload domains, not another console to manage.
Where DTS Solution Fits
The gaps Fortinet’s report documents are not abstractions for DTS Solution, they are the exact problems the company’s practice areas are built to address. As a regional cybersecurity leader, DTS Solution works with enterprises across the Middle East to close these structural vulnerabilities before they become incidents.
On the cloud side, DTS Solution’s Cloud Security practice directly confronts the fragmentation problem. Rather than layering disconnected tools, DTS Solution helps organizations implement unified cloud security architectures, consolidating visibility across multi-cloud environments, enforcing consistent posture controls, and integrating detection across identity, configuration, and data domains. This maps precisely to what the Fortinet report identifies as the path out of the complexity gap.
On the identity and access front, the single largest risk category in the report at 77%, DTS Solution’s Zero Trust and Private Access solutions address the root cause: over-permissioned identities and implicit trust between cloud resources. Zero Trust treats every access request as unverified by default, regardless of whether the request originates inside or outside the network perimeter. In a multi-cloud world where non-human identities multiply and credentials move across providers, this model is not optional, it is foundational.
Five Principles That Separate Mature Programs
The report closes with a set of operating principles drawn from organizations that have made measurable progress:
Principle | What It Means in Practice |
Treat Visibility as a Foundation | Unified observability across accounts, identities, data stores, and workloads must be a baseline requirement — not an aspirational goal. |
Reduce Fragmentation | Rationalize overlapping tools. Consolidate around shared telemetry and policy. Every additional console adds friction and operational load. |
Connect the Risk Domains | Assess identity, configuration, and data exposure together. Cloud attacks exploit the relationships between these domains — not each domain in isolation. |
Automate for Outcomes | Focus automation on resolving issues, not generating notifications. Alert-only automation shifts burden to already-stretched teams. |
Extend Beyond Cloud Boundaries | Cloud security must connect with network, SaaS, and endpoint visibility. The attack surface spans all of these, fragmented integration produces fragmented detection. |
Conclusion
The 2026 Fortinet Cloud Security Report confirms what many security teams already feel: the problem in cloud security is not awareness or budget — it is architecture. Most organizations have deployed too many tools that share too little context, staffed by teams that are too stretched to correlate signals manually. Attackers have automated their side of the equation. Defenders need to do the same, but grounded in a unified foundation rather than another layer of siloed products.
For organizations operating across hybrid and multi-cloud environments in the region, the question is not whether to act — 88% of peers already operate this way. The question is whether your current architecture can actually detect and contain a breach before the damage compounds. If the answer is uncertain, that uncertainty is the gap worth closing first.
Where DTS Solution Fits
The gaps Fortinet’s report documents are not abstractions for DTS Solution, they are the exact problems the company’s practice areas are built to address. As a regional cybersecurity leader, DTS Solution works with enterprises across the Middle East to close these structural vulnerabilities before they become incidents.
On the cloud side, DTS Solution’s Cloud Security practice directly confronts the fragmentation problem. Rather than layering disconnected tools, DTS Solution helps organizations implement unified cloud security architectures, consolidating visibility across multi-cloud environments, enforcing consistent posture controls, and integrating detection across identity, configuration, and data domains. This maps precisely to what the Fortinet report identifies as the path out of the complexity gap.
On the identity and access front, the single largest risk category in the report at 77%, DTS Solution’s Zero Trust and Private Access solutions address the root cause: over-permissioned identities and implicit trust between cloud resources. Zero Trust treats every access request as unverified by default, regardless of whether the request originates inside or outside the network perimeter. In a multi-cloud world where non-human identities multiply and credentials move across providers, this model is not optional, it is foundational.
Five Principles That Separate Mature Programs
The report closes with a set of operating principles drawn from organizations that have made measurable progress:
Principle | What It Means in Practice |
Treat Visibility as a Foundation | Unified observability across accounts, identities, data stores, and workloads must be a baseline requirement — not an aspirational goal. |
Reduce Fragmentation | Rationalize overlapping tools. Consolidate around shared telemetry and policy. Every additional console adds friction and operational load. |
Connect the Risk Domains | Assess identity, configuration, and data exposure together. Cloud attacks exploit the relationships between these domains — not each domain in isolation. |
Automate for Outcomes | Focus automation on resolving issues, not generating notifications. Alert-only automation shifts burden to already-stretched teams. |
Extend Beyond Cloud Boundaries | Cloud security must connect with network, SaaS, and endpoint visibility. The attack surface spans all of these, fragmented integration produces fragmented detection. |
Conclusion
The 2026 Fortinet Cloud Security Report confirms what many security teams already feel: the problem in cloud security is not awareness or budget — it is architecture. Most organizations have deployed too many tools that share too little context, staffed by teams that are too stretched to correlate signals manually. Attackers have automated their side of the equation. Defenders need to do the same, but grounded in a unified foundation rather than another layer of siloed products.
For organizations operating across hybrid and multi-cloud environments in the region, the question is not whether to act — 88% of peers already operate this way. The question is whether your current architecture can actually detect and contain a breach before the damage compounds. If the answer is uncertain, that uncertainty is the gap worth closing first.
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