The COVID-19 pandemic forced many changes upon enterprises that caused ripple effect throughout the security community, which was evident in the survey responses. The shift to remote work and 

the subsequent accelerated use of cloud-based infrastructure have had profound impacts on security teams. Only a fifth of respondents (20%) indicated that their security infrastructure was very prepared to deal with the disruption. The shift to remote work was a large contributor to that disruption. Almost 82% of respondents were somewhat or very concerned about the security risks and threats that a greatly increased remote workforce poses. Almost half (44%) were not confident that their access security systems could effectively secure remote work.

Increased cloud consumption seems to have strained security operations as well. Data protection mechanisms such as encryption don’t appear to be scaling up with the increased use of public cloud. The results show strong cloud use: 31% of respondents said that 41-50% of their workloads and data resides in external clouds, and 24% reported more than half. However, only 17% indicated that they have protected more than 50% of their sensitive data in cloud with encryption. There are some glimmers of hope in that regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services are doing better than average, but the situation clearly needs work.