Only 8 per cent of IT security executives said they fully understand the Cloud shared responsibility security model, 87 per cent of IT professionals saw AI/ML capabilities as a "must-have" for new security purchases, said the third annual ‘Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020'.

The study of 750 cybersecurity and IT professionals across the globe found that a patchwork approach to data security, misconfigured services and confusion around new cloud security models has created a crisis of confidence that will only be fixed by organizations making security part of the culture of their business.

"Adopting tools that leverage intelligent automation to help close the skills gap are on the IT spend roadmap for the immediate future and the C-level is methodically unifying the different lines of business with a security-first culture in mind," said Steve Daheb, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud.

While 78 per cent of organisations said they are using more than 50 discrete cybersecurity products to address security issues, 37 per cent used more than 100 cybersecurity products.

Organisations who discovered misconfigured cloud services experienced 10 or more data loss incidents in the last year, according to the report.

IT professionals have concerns about cloud service providers. Nearly 80 per cent are concerned that cloud service providers they do business with will become competitors in their core markets.

"Seventy-five per cent of IT professionals view public cloud as more secure than their own data centres, yet 92 per cent of IT professionals do not trust their organization is well prepared to secure public cloud services," the findings showed.

Nearly 80 per cent of IT professionals said that recent data breaches experienced by other businesses have increased their organization's focus on securing data moving forward.

IT professionals are using a patchwork of different cybersecurity products to try and address data security concerns, but face an uphill battle as these systems are seldom configured correctly, according to the report.

"In response to the current challenging environment, companies have accelerated the movement of workloads, and associated sensitive data, to the cloud to support a new way of working, and to help optimize cost models. This is exposing existing vulnerabilities and creating new risks," explained Tony Buffomante, Global Co-Leader and U.S. Leader of KPMG LLP's Cyber Security Services.