New research shows that the rise of artificial intelligence is forcing most security and IT leaders to rethink their approaches to managing the risks of hybrid clouds.
The Gigamon 2025 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey conducted in Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the UK and the US found that 91% of security and IT leaders are re-adjusting their understanding of hybrid cloud risk due to the increasing impact of AI technology.
A survey that has collected responses from over 1,000 experts shows that cyber threats are growing in both volume and refinement. In Australia, violation rates have risen sharply over the past year with attacks generated by AIs identified as a key cause of this surge, rising 17% year-on-year to 53%.
Security and IT teams are under great pressure as global cybercrime costs $3 trillion a year, according to figures from the World Economic Forum. While many organizations tackle challenges such as inefficient security tools, fragmented cloud environments, and inadequate threat intelligence, the enemy using AI is more agile.
The findings in the report highlight the extent to which AI is restructuring security priorities for hybrid cloud infrastructures. Management of AI-derived threats is currently a major security concern for 46% of security and IT leaders. A third of those surveyed point out that network data volumes have doubled over the past two years, and that this increase is due to AI-related workloads.
In Australia, 56% of respondents observe the growth of attacks directed at the deployment of large-scale language models (LLMs). Additionally, 58% have experienced a significant increase in AI-powered ransomware attacks from 41% in 2024, highlighting the trends that attackers will exploit AI to overcome existing cyber defenses.
Most security and IT leaders acknowledge that they must compromise when securing and managing their hybrid cloud infrastructure. In Australia, this figure has risen to 94%. The main reasons cited in these compromises are lack of clean, high quality data needed for secure AI workload deployments (46%) and lack of monitoring across the digital environment, including the ability to monitor the lateral movement of East and West network traffic (47%).
Public Cloud Security Risks are also being evaluated updated. Public clouds were widely adopted during the post-pandemic transition to digital operations, but are viewed as a source of risk. Research shows that 70% of security and IT leaders view public cloud as a greater risk than any other environment. As a result, comparable percentages are actively considering moving their data back from public cloud to private cloud due to security concerns, with 54% reluctant to use AI solutions in public clouds, citing concerns about intellectual property protection.
The need for improved visibility is highlighted in the findings. Increased refinement in cyberattacks has revealed limitations on existing security tools. This is more than half (55%) of security, and IT leaders report lacking confidence in their ability to detect violations of their current toolsets, primarily due to insufficient visibility. Therefore, 64% say their main objective for next year is to achieve real-time threat monitoring through comprehensive real-time visibility into all moving data.
David Land, APAC vice president at Gigamon, commented: “Security teams are struggling to meet the increasing speed, complexity and vulnerability of AI adoption in public cloud environments. Deep observability addresses this challenge by combining melt data with network-derived telemetry such as packets, flows, and metadata, and by eliminating risk to the team. As it is important for 87% of security and IT leaders to ensure AI deployment, they will increase their confidence and act proactively.
Globally, 10 (89%) of security and IT leaders are currently watching the deep observability that is essential to ensuring and managing hybrid cloud infrastructure. The survey shows that board members are increasingly involved in these issues, with 83% of Australian respondents showing that deep observability is being addressed at the boardroom level in response to evolving threats to hybrid cloud environments.
This study was conducted in collaboration with the Vitreous World and was based on responses collected from 1,021 participants in February and March 2025.
