Cloud security teams face an unprecedented identity sprawl challenge as organizations struggle to manage thousands of interconnected identities across complex containerized environments, according to Forrester research.
The most pressing issue facing cloud security teams isn’t traditional malware or network intrusions. It’s identity sprawl, according to a Forrester market analysis.
Cloud workload security teams are facing an unprecedented challenge as organizations struggle to manage thousands of interconnected identities in the cloud and increasingly complex containerized environments.
Teams must manage thousands of seemingly low-privilege administrative accounts that can nevertheless often access high-privilege compute resources containing sensitive data through complex transitive relationships. This “identity maze” cannot be effectively managed through manual configuration reviews, and many organizations lack the specialized tools needed to map and monitor these access patterns.
The problem extends beyond static permissions. Dynamic changes to cloud configurations, such as administrators suddenly gaining access to new security groups or sensitive data, often go undetected. Traditional security tools weren’t designed to track these fluid identity relationships, leaving organizations blind to significant access risks.
Container adoption has further complicated the problem, creating what many describe as “cloud on top of cloud,” because it introduces additional layers of complexity that traditional infrastructure security cannot address. Container orchestrators have their own administrative identities requiring careful privilege management, while container runtimes complicate network access controls and make data exfiltration detection significantly more difficult.
Organizations must now secure secrets embedded within containers while preventing vulnerabilities in infrastructure-as-code scripts from compromising entire deployment pipelines. IT needs the capability to automatically halt deployments when systems detect security issues in build scripts, but many security teams lack this capability.
Two primary approaches to addressing this issue have emerged. Agentless solutions provide rapid deployment and broad visibility without software installation. However, this convenience can come at a price because they may miss the deep runtime insights that agent-based solutions provide. Organizations should not rely exclusively on either approach, because each serves different but complementary security needs.
The rapid pace of cloud evolution continues to outstrip security teams’ ability to maintain consistent protection. Organizations are facing constant pressure to quickly adopt new cloud capabilities while maintaining comprehensive security coverage—a tension that traditional security frameworks struggle to resolve. What’s more, new services and deployment models are emerging from cloud providers faster than security tools can provide adequate coverage, particularly in areas like serverless computing and edge deployments.
Cloud workload security cannot be solved through technology procurement alone. Success requires adaptive strategies that orchestrate specialized capabilities while maintaining consistent policy enforcement across diverse infrastructure types.
Forrester identified Palo Alto Networks as a market leader for its comprehensive cloud security posture management, with particularly strong administrative identity and access management features. The company’s broad configuration and compliance templates were highlighted as differentiators.
Forrester concludes that as the market matures, differentiation increasingly depends on specialized capabilities rather than broad feature coverage, making careful vendor selection crucial for organizations seeking to optimize their cloud security investments.
Read the full report for a deeper dive into these issues and strategies for solving them.
