Cloud Security Statistics for 2026

Cloud is now the default place sensitive data lives, and attackers have followed it there. According to the Thales 2025 Global Cloud Security Study, 44% of organizations have suffered a cloud data breach, with 14% reporting one in the past year, and 55% of security leaders now say cloud is harder to secure than on-premises. The Cloud Security Alliance ranks misconfiguration as the number one threat to cloud computing, with identity and access management close behind. And CrowdStrike's 2025 Threat Hunting Report found cloud intrusions in the first half of 2025 already exceeded all of 2024 by 136%. The numbers below capture what 2026 cloud security looks like in practice.

Cloud security statistics at a glance

• The global average cost of a data breach fell to $4.44 million in 2025, but breaches involving data spread across multiple environments cost the most at $5.05 million, per IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report.
• 44% of organizations have experienced a cloud data breach at some point, and 14% reported a cloud breach in the last 12 months (Thales 2025).
• Only 8% of organizations encrypt 80% or more of their cloud data, even though 85% say at least 40% of their cloud data is sensitive (Thales 2025).
• Misconfiguration and inadequate change control is the number one cloud threat, with identity and access management ranked number two, according to the Cloud Security Alliance's Top Threats to Cloud Computing 2024 report.
• 59% of AWS IAM users, 55% of Google Cloud service accounts, and 40% of Microsoft Entra ID applications have an access key older than one year (Datadog's 2025 State of Cloud Security).
• Cloud intrusions in the first half of 2025 grew 136% over all of 2024, and valid account abuse is the leading initial access tactic in 35% of cloud incidents (CrowdStrike 2025).
• 60% of breaches involve a human element such as misconfiguration, misdelivery, or stolen credentials, per the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report.
• Worldwide information security spending is projected to reach $244.2 billion in 2026, with cloud security as the fastest-growing subsegment at 28.8% growth, according to Gartner.
• 97% of organizations that suffered an AI-related security incident said they lacked proper AI access controls (IBM 2025).

70% of organizations now run a hybrid cloud strategy and use an average of 2.4 public cloud providers (Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report).

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Cloud breach costs and economic impact

Breach economics shifted in 2025. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report recorded the first global decline in five years, with the average breach falling 9% to $4.44 million, down from $4.88 million in 2024. IBM credited faster detection and containment, with breaches identified and contained in a mean of 241 days, the lowest figure in nine years. Cloud-specific numbers tell a more complicated story. Public cloud incidents averaged $4.18 million, while private cloud breaches cost $4.68 million, and breaches involving data stored across multiple environments cost $5.05 million, the most expensive deployment in the report.

Detection times mirror those costs. Public cloud breaches take an average of 251 days to identify and contain, while cross-environment breaches stretch to 276 days, 59 days longer than on-premises incidents, according to IBM 2025. The pattern is consistent. The more cloud surface area a workload spans, the longer attackers stay inside and the more it costs to remove them.

Spending is rising to match. Gartner forecasts worldwide end-user spending on information security at $213 billion in 2025 and $244.2 billion in 2026, a 13.3% jump in current dollars. Inside that pie, cloud security is the fastest-growing subsegment at 28.8% year-over-year growth, with the combined CSPM, CASB, and CWPP market expected to reach $32.4 billion by 2029.

Misconfigurations and the shared responsibility gap

Misconfiguration sits at the top of the threat list and has done so consistently. The Cloud Security Alliance's Top Threats to Cloud Computing 2024 report, informed by responses from more than 500 industry experts, ranks misconfiguration and inadequate change control as the number one cloud security concern, ahead of identity and access management at number two and insecure APIs at number three. Concerns that dominated earlier years, including denial of service and shared technology vulnerabilities, dropped out of the top eleven entirely, a signal that the attack surface has shifted from infrastructure to configuration and identity.

The fingerprints of misconfiguration show up in breach data as well. The Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 60% of breaches involve a human element, with misconfigured systems, misdelivery, and stolen credentials the dominant patterns. Permission misconfigurations are particularly stubborn. Verizon reports that half of all permission findings take close to eight months to remediate, a window that gives attackers time to map an environment and pivot.

Public storage buckets remain a recurring failure mode. Datadog's 2025 State of Cloud Security study notes that despite AWS blocking public access by default for new S3 buckets since April 2023 and Azure following suit for storage accounts created after November 2023, breaches involving public cloud storage continued in 2025, leaking medical records, database backups, and financial records from organizations that never adjusted older buckets.

Identity, IAM, and long-lived credentials

Cloud identity is the new perimeter, and most organizations are still operating with hot keys lying around. Datadog's 2025 State of Cloud Security study analyzed the security posture of thousands of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments and found that 59% of AWS IAM users have an active access key older than one year, 55% of Google Cloud service accounts have a key older than one year, and 40% of Microsoft Entra ID applications have an unrotated key older than a year. Half of those AWS access keys have been unused for 90 days, which means they are not just old but stale and forgotten.

Identity weaknesses translate directly into intrusions. CrowdStrike's 2025 Threat Hunting Report found that valid account abuse is now the primary initial access tactic in 35% of cloud incidents, meaning attackers are logging in rather than hacking in. Cloud-conscious intrusions, where adversaries deliberately exploit cloud-native services and APIs, rose 37% overall in 2025, with state-nexus actors increasing their cloud-focused activity by 266%.

Federated identity adoption is moving in the right direction but slowly. Datadog 2025 reports 79% of organizations now use federated authentication for human access to the AWS console, up from 76% in 2024. Almost two in five (39%) still use IAM users in some capacity, and one in five relies on IAM users exclusively. Those legacy patterns are exactly what attackers exploit when credentials leak.

Multi-cloud sprawl, SaaS, and the encryption gap

Most organizations are not running one cloud. They are running several. The Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report found 70% of organizations now use a hybrid cloud model with at least one public and one private cloud, and the average enterprise uses 2.4 public cloud providers. 84% of respondents say managing cloud spend is now their top cloud challenge, ahead of security, and 27% of IaaS and PaaS spend is still wasted on idle or oversized resources, which expands the unmanaged attack surface.

SaaS has multiplied alongside infrastructure. The Thales 2025 Global Cloud Security Study, which surveyed nearly 3,200 respondents across 20 countries, found enterprises now use an average of 85 SaaS applications. 54% of data stored in the cloud is sensitive, up from 47% the year before, yet only 8% of organizations encrypt 80% or more of that cloud data. 85% say at least 40% of their cloud data is sensitive. The gap between what is sensitive and what is actually encrypted is the single biggest unforced error in cloud security today.

Access attacks reflect the sprawl. 68% of Thales respondents reported access-based attacks involving stolen credentials and secrets, the fastest-growing tactic targeting cloud infrastructure (Thales 2025). When a single set of leaked credentials can pivot across SaaS, IaaS, and identity providers, the blast radius is no longer one application.

Emerging cloud security trends in 2026

AI is the dominant story for 2026 cloud security. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 13% of organizations experienced an attack that impacted their AI models or applications, and 97% of those that suffered an AI-related security incident said they lacked proper AI access controls. 63% of the 600 organizations Ponemon studied for IBM said they have no AI governance policies in place to prevent shadow AI usage. A high level of shadow AI added an extra $670,000 to the global average breach cost.

Cloud-targeting attacks are accelerating fast. CrowdStrike 2025 reports cloud intrusions in the first half of 2025 already exceeded the entire prior year by 136%. New and unattributed cloud intrusions grew 26% year over year, and the 266% surge in state-nexus cloud activity points to nation-state interest in cloud workloads as more government and enterprise data lands there.

Third-party and supply chain risk is the other thread to watch. The Verizon 2025 DBIR documented a sharp rise in third-party breach involvement, including credential exposures from partners and misconfigured SaaS environments. Verizon highlighted a Snowflake customer incident where unenforced MFA allowed attackers to exfiltrate data from approximately 165 organizations at scale, a reminder that one cloud platform misconfigured at one tenant can cascade across an industry.

The Thales 2025 study found 52% of enterprises are prioritizing AI security investments over other security categories, and 55% now say cloud is harder to secure than on-prem, a 4-point increase from the previous year. That sentiment shift is showing up in budgets. Per Gartner, cloud security is the fastest-growing line item in the entire $244 billion 2026 security spend forecast.

For broader context on the trends above, see our data breach statistics and zero trust statistics roundups.

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