The State of Cloud Security 2026 | Prowler
New 2026 Research Report

The State of
Cloud Security 2026

Signal vs. Noise: How AI Is Reshaping Cloud Security Operations. What 633 cybersecurity professionals across nine countries say about the gap between AI's promise and operational reality.

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71
Weekly Incidents
18%
AI at Scale
46%
Trust Gap
42%
Skills Shortage
53%
Cost Concerns
67%
Want ROI Proof
Key Findings

Detection isn't the hard problem.
Everything after is.

Context gathering, re-triage, lost institutional knowledge, and the manual toil of stitching siloed data together — that's what's broken.

3,600+
Annual Incidents Per Team
The average security team handles 71 incidents per week. Over a quarter spend more than half their time on low-value manual tasks.
46%
Don't Trust Autonomous AI
Nearly half of all respondents aren't convinced AI systems can be relied upon to act autonomously in security-critical environments.
42%
Cite Talent Gaps as #1 Barrier
Skills shortages, compliance burden, and limited automation form a compounding cycle that deepens burnout and accelerates turnover.
57%
Prioritize Threat Detection
Teams want AI to automate the foundational tasks — threat detection, incident triage, and compliance — that absorb the most analyst time.
26%
Want AI Copilots, Not Autopilots
Teams want tools that eliminate toil so their best engineers can focus on judgment calls, not data assembly.
67%
Need Cost Savings to Adopt
Among non-adopters, the burden of proof falls squarely on vendors to demonstrate measurable, defensible ROI.
"

There's a meaningful difference between bolting a chatbot onto a dashboard and building an AI system that's grounded in years of practitioner knowledge, that understands enterprise context, and that was built by people who've been living and breathing cloud security since before it was a market category.

— From the Report: The AI Adoption Gap

What's Inside

7 chapters of actionable intelligence

From operational strain to AI adoption strategy — a blueprint for what AI-native cloud security must become.

01
The State of Cloud Security Operations
How weekly incidents, skills shortages, and compliance complexity are overwhelming security teams.
02
The Cloud Platform Landscape
Why familiarity drives adoption, multi-cloud remains aspirational, and teams want vendors to meet them where they are.
03
The AI Adoption Gap
Why ambitions outpace adoption, trust remains the biggest barrier, and only 18% have achieved autonomous AI at scale.
04
The Visibility Crisis
Why teams are seeing everything but understanding nothing — and how attack path visualization changes the game.
05
Where AI Can Actually Help
The three capabilities that matter most, and why practical automation beats moonshot promises.
06
What Will Separate Leaders from Laggards
The dividing line isn't sophistication — it's pragmatism. What non-adopters need to see.
07
The Case for AI-Native Cloud Security
From scanner to teammate: what AI-native security must deliver, and why open-source foundations create the flywheel effect.
Methodology

Research you can trust

Conducted in partnership with Kickstand, surveying 633 cybersecurity professionals in December 2025 and early 2026 at 95% confidence with ±4% margin of error.

633
Professionals surveyed
9
Countries represented
35%
SaaS industry
20%
Financial services
Respondent Breakdown
Security Analysts38%
Security Engineers25%
DevSecOps13%
CISOs10%
Other Cybersecurity Roles14%
US 32% UK 32% France Germany Italy Spain AU/NZ Brazil

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