Recent research from Gigamon reveals that businesses today face no shortage of risks and technical considerations when it comes to their technology. Gigamon Chief Security Officer, Chaim Mazal, spoke with Channel Insider about the study findings and his insights into the AI and cloud-related takeaways partners and customers should know.
Research shows cloud security strongly impacted by AI-generated threats
The annual study, now in its third year, surveyed over 1,000 global security and IT leaders across Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This year’s findings show that executives are increasingly concerned about how AI is enabling threat actors worldwide.
46 percent of security and IT leaders say managing AI-generated threats is now their top security priority. One in three organizations report that network data volumes have more than doubled in the past two years due to AI workloads, while nearly half of all respondents (47 percent) are seeing a rise in attacks targeting their organization’s large language model (LLM) deployments.
Additionally, more than half (58 percent) say they’ve seen a surge in AI-powered ransomware—up from 41 percent in 2024, underscoring how adversaries are exploiting AI to outpace and outflank existing defenses.
The survey results show an executive-level focus on protecting their organizations from new threat capabilities, while also continuing to need to devote resources to the myriad other risks and vulnerabilities that threaten to wreak havoc.
“We think we have levelled up, but we’re still seeing some of the same shortcomings because the tech is getting better on both sides,” said Mazal.
The threat posed by AI-generated attacks is only part of the overall security risk brought on by. As companies aggressively push to implement AI tooling in their processes, not all are weighing the risks as they do so.
“It’s kind of like the race to cloud, except with the cloud conversation, there was always a hesitancy. Now, though, everyone is trying to figure out AI collectively at the same time while also racing to adopt it,” Mazal said.
Public cloud-based risks continue to receive scrutiny
70 percent of those surveyed now view the public cloud as a greater risk than any other environment. As a result, 70 percent report that their organization is actively considering repatriating data from public to private cloud due to security concerns, and 54 percent are reluctant to use AI in public cloud environments, citing concerns about intellectual property protection.
Additionally, Mazal notes that the repatriation from the cloud and return to at least some on-premises infrastructure for a growing number of organizations is revealing the limits of a cloud-native future.
“Some organizations that went all-in on migrating everything over to the cloud didn’t necessarily think about the long-term implications on how to scale the infrastructure,” Mazal said. “I think as time goes on and businesses continue to roll back, the hybrid approach with some cloud and some on-premises deployments is likely where we’ll land across the industry.”
The shifting approach to cloud coincides with the demand for AI, as the focus shifts to the best environments built for leveraging large swaths of data securely and efficiently. Visibility, Mazal says, will be key to ensuring all goals are met appropriately.
“Organizations need to identify a strategic approach to deploy and map out their architecture so they can see where their AI is, and we need to treat it like we do any other sensitive data,” Mazal said.
How organizations can leverage observability to stay secure
Ultimately, this research will likely leave partners and their customers asking how they can address these pain points and better meet security needs to keep organizations more protected.
At the same time, respondents in the survey don’t believe they have the tools in place to do that effectively.
More than half (55 percent) of respondents reported a lack of confidence in their current tools’ ability to detect breaches, citing limited visibility as the primary issue. As a result, 64 percent said that their number one focus for the next 12 months is achieving real-time threat monitoring delivered through having complete visibility into all data in motion.
To address this, Gigamon recommends its approach to “deep observability,” which enables customers to gain more visibility across their organizations.
“I really think we need to get back to threat modeling and tie everything together to get a comprehensive picture of risk,” Mazal said. “You can’t secure the things you don’t know about.”
“This also allows CIOs and CISOs to bring the business development perspective to security, because data visibility affects an entire organization, especially where things like AI and cloud are considered,” added Mazal.
AI-generated security threats are the next frontier of attacks. Catch up on how Microsoft and its partners are leveraging agentic AI to protect organizations.