Cloud network security is a fast-changing landscape with shifts constantly happening in different spheres: business requirements, technology, regulations, industry standards, cyberthreats, the list goes on and on—and enterprise developer, cloud, networking, and security teams all have their hands full doing their day-to-day work. But it’s important to pause every once in a while to take stock, understand where we are right now, and smartly address current challenges to create a more efficient path to success.
To this end, Aviatrix published the State of Cloud Network Security: 2025, detailing the results from our comprehensive survey of 403 U.S. IT professionals. The study is packed with information to help organizations benchmark and improve their own cloud network security practices. This is critical insight for people who are directly responsible for the security of their organization’s cloud network—be it multicloud, hybrid cloud, or both—and is valuable for anyone involved in cloud-based operations.
The survey uncovered six significant trends that highlight areas where organizations are currently struggling. As they say, understanding a problem is the first step, but it’s not enough—you also have to take the second step of solving it. Here’s an overview of the six big cloud network security trends and how Aviatrix can help you address them.
Trend #1: Widely adopted cloud firewalls are challenging to implement and integrate
Key stats:
91% of respondents use firewalls provided by their cloud provider, and 64% also deploy third-party solutions.
67% struggle to integrate the tools effectively within their broader security stack, 55% experience performance overhead, and 50% have scalability challenges.
Impact: Problems integrating cloud-native firewalls can expose dangerous security gaps.
Solution: The Aviatrix Cloud Firewall offers an embedded approach that delivers unified protection across clouds, eliminating integration headaches.
Trend #2: Zero trust remains theoretical without solving for existing gaps
Key stats:
8% use zero trust architectures for securing inter-cloud traffic.
29% use zero trust API security models.
58% are deploying microsegmentation extensively, but 42% are still immature or not yet adopting it.
Impact: Zero trust maturity remains shockingly low when it comes to security traffic between clouds. (And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the issues of zero trust for workloads in east-west or lateral environments, which we address with Cloud Native Security Fabric.)
Solution: Aviatrix helps you operationalize zero trust across clouds without ripping and replacing existing tools.
Trend #3: Blind spots remain a large threat in cloud network security
Key stats:
51% need to improve their network traffic visibility.
20% leverage third-party threat intelligence feeds, so there’s limited reliance on external context for security monitoring.
76% use native cloud tools, which offer only basic telemetry.
Impact: Blind spots remain the biggest threat in cloud network security and enterprises lack sufficient visibility into network traffic.
Solution: The Aviatrix Cloud Firewall closes this gap with real-time, embedded observability across multicloud environments, leveraging contextual insights for runtime protection.
Trend #4: Companies lack transparency into legacy cloud firewall costs
Key stats:
63% faced unexpected firewall costs in the past year.
Of those, 69% had more than $50,000 in unexpected costs and 35% had more than $100,000.
Impact: Cloud firewall pricing models can result in highly variable end-of-month costs, blindsiding companies and eating into their budgets.
Solution: The Aviatrix Cloud Firewall offers flat-rate licensing for transparent pricing and a cost-aware architecture to put an end to cloud firewall sticker shock.
Trend #5: DevOps security and east-west traffic controls are non-existent or lagging
Key stats:
46% face major challenges securing DevOps pipelines, and another 39% experience minor issues.
52% report difficulty managing east-west traffic.
Impact: Cloud-native security shouldn’t mean fractured policies in the development process.
Solution: The Aviatrix Kubernetes Firewall ensures consistent protection across IaaS and Kubernetes environments.
Trend #6: AI adoption in security is high
Key stats:
95% are leveraging AI and/or machine learning for threat detection, with 57% doing so extensively.
Impact: AI/ML are powerful tools that can enhance IT professionals’ management and troubleshooting capabilities by orders of magnitude.
Solution: Aviatrix enhances your advanced security and visibility toolkit with AI-powered discovery, analysis, and classification of traffic flows, as well as AI-assisted insights to enhance problem-solving and resolve connectivity issues faster.
Other cloud network security questions answered
Get the full 2025 State of Cloud Network Security report for the answers to see how your organization compares. The survey also digs deeper into a number of topics within the overall realm of cloud network security, answering a lot of questions about the current state of:
Hybrid/multicloud
Which cloud service providers (CSPs) are being used?
How are workloads being secured in hybrid and multicloud environments?
What are the biggest challenges in security workloads in hybrid and multicloud environments?
Cloud network security postures and controls
How confident are organizations in their ability to detect and respond to threats to cloud workloads?
What controls and practices do they have in place?
What kinds of security incidents have organizations experienced in the past year?
What are the challenges and weaknesses in current controls?
How successful are organizations in forecasting cloud security costs?
What are the challenges of securing DevOps pipelines in the cloud?
Cloud firewalls
What kinds of cloud firewall solutions are being used?
Did misconfigurations in cloud firewall settings lead to security breaches?
How confident are organizations that their cloud firewall configurations align with new compliance requirements?
How often do organizations review and update their cloud firewall rules and policies?
How prevalent are Kubernetes firewall solutions to secure containerized applications?
What are the challenges of cloud firewall implementation?
What assumptions about native cloud firewall capabilities have resulted in issues?
Did organizations face unexpected costs related to cloud firewall implementation and how much were those costs?
Encryption
How many organizations encrypt data in transit and at rest?
In the face of recent encryption-related breaches, how many organizations have audited encryption protocols and reevaluated their cloud security strategies?
Cloud networking
How many organizations believe they are getting full value from their cloud investments?
What challenges are they facing in getting maximum value?
What obstacles are they facing in deploying cloud-based technologies?
What cloud monitoring and management platforms are being used?
How many organizations faced cloud networking outages in the past year, and what were the causes?
Cloud talent
How important is skill set to the success of cloud strategy?
Have organizations struggled to hire necessary candidates?
What cloud skills are most pressing?
What cloud skills are lacking in the current talent pool?
Cloud costs
What percent of cloud budgets are allocated to networking costs?
How successful are organizations in forecasting cloud networking costs?
How important is it to have billback/chargeback capabilities for cloud costs and do organizations struggle with such models?
How interested are organizations in moving to consumption-based billing for customer-facing applications?
What are your biggest cloud network security challenges? Aviatrix can help, and getting started is easy.
Register for a webinar on July 31 to hear Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt and Enterprise Strategy Group Principal Analyst John Grady discuss how CNSF enables enterprises to close their most dangerous security blind spots.
Save your seat at another webinar on August 5 to hear security veteran Tom Pageler discuss key findings of the report.
