Today, the conversation around ‘hybrid IT security’ has essentially become the broader cybersecurity discussion. Recent research reveals that “a mere 2% of organizations are ‘all in’ on one public cloud, and even among this tiny fraction, only 34% have fully committed their investments to a single cloud provider.” The needs of a modern enterprise transcend the offerings of a single cloud provider alone — and often of the cloud in general — as many critical infrastructure sectors still need to leverage on-premises systems.
However, just because hybrid IT is the standard today, does not mean everyone knows how to secure it effectively. Securing a hybrid environment takes a special set of skills, and in a time when many are still recovering from a headlong dive into digitization, security — as always — is having a hard time keeping pace with progress.
Here’s how to think about hybrid IT security, and how it differs from the default cybersecurity methods we’re increasingly leaving behind.
Benefits of a Hybrid IT Environment
The 2025 Fortra State of Cybersecurity Survey reveals that 60% of respondents currently employ a hybrid cloud strategy, “[allowing] them to use either cloud or on-premises infrastructure when one or the other will work best.” On top of that, 22% of organizations are planning to speed up hybrid cloud adoption over the next 12-24 months, according to The 2025 State of Cloud Report. A hybrid cloud strategy aims to easily scale to fluctuating business needs and put workloads where they would be best served. This allows teams to optimize considerations for:
- Compliance
- Collaboration
- Data accessibility
- Data processing
- Workflow management
- Cost savings
- Automatic updates
- Lingering customization where needed
And more. This also allows critical sectors that lean on OT and other on-prem resources (SCADA systems, for example) to reap the benefits of the cloud in some areas while still keeping a solid foot on-prem. Hosting resources in the public cloud (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Services) offers scalability and cost effectiveness, while allowing organizations to prioritize compliance and data privacy requirements.
Each environment provides different upsides, and with a hybrid approach, businesses can use the best of each. Unfortunately, with the benefits come the challenges. Currently, security is among them, and one of the most significant.
What Is Hybrid Security? (And Why Is It So Hard?)
Hybrid security is the practice of protecting all assets within an environment that’s made up of any mixture of public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises platforms. However, many organizations find it challenging — so much so that it becomes an inhibitor to even get started down the hybrid path.
Without hybrid-specific security thinking in place, organizations that just jump into a hybrid cloud environment could easily end up with visibility gaps. When you can’t see where your data lies, or get confused as to where the workflows lead, you can’t protect that data. This results in data breaches and the compliance violations that inevitably preceded them. One data breach alone costs an average of $4.88 million, and the reputational damage caused by lax hybrid security could send the price tag soaring even higher.
Maybe this explains why so many hesitate to take the plunge, along with these three reasons:
1. 59% intimidated by hybrid IT security
As Fortra’s 2025 State of Cybersecurity Survey revealed, not everyone felt they were in a position to migrate to hybrid, despite its obvious benefits. Reasons cited were:
- Not enough money (27%)
- No stakeholder alignment (23%)
- Security concerns (59%)
The hybrid security intimidation factor looms large, as the last figure suggests, and puts a number to a sentiment one participant expressed: “We are not sophisticated enough to understand what to do in the cloud.” This supports the finding that 4 in 10 held back on cloud adoption due to a lack of skilled professionals (in security, among other things). Many well-intentioned organizations find themselves feet-first in a cloud strategy they too do not understand, to the detriment of their data security and customer privacy later.
2. Hybrid cloud also can mean multi-cloud
On top of that, a hybrid cloud environment can also be multi-cloud, making matters even more complicated. This happens when there is more than one public cloud in the mix (say you use both Azure and AWS). The benefits of multi-cloud are similar to that of hybrid in general; you can use the best tool for the best job, mixing and matching as you go. However, security specifics for both must be accounted for and integrated seamlessly into the hybrid structure.
According to NIST, the four types of cloud deployments are:
- Public Cloud: Cloud infrastructure shared across multiple organizations and accessible to the public (AWS, Google Cloud Services, Azure).
- Private Cloud: Cloud infrastructure only accessible by and intended for a single organization.
- Community Cloud: Cloud infrastructure shared by a group of organizations with shared interests.
- Hybrid Cloud: As NIST states, a hybrid cloud can comprise at least two cloud deployments, or “a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public)” that allow data and applications to move between them.
3. You’ve got to increase your expertise
Hybrid IT security is challenging because it not only requires a comprehensive knowledge of one environment, but potentially all three. As anyone with a cloud presence knows, cloud security not only requires a foundational understanding of cybersecurity in general (a good start), but expertise in cloud-specific services and solutions.
No matter if you’re managing multiple public clouds, a public and a private cloud, or a private cloud and on-premises resources (or any combination of the three), security will be more complex than it was before and needs to be handled with care. That’s why many lean on managed security services providers or bespoke platforms that provide hybrid-specific solutions to the problems below.
Specific Hybrid Environment Security Challenges
Learning (and mastering) cloud security is hard enough. However, when you combine all three environments, there are additional unforeseen challenges that arise. You get:
Compliance challenges
Without the proper tooling, keeping compliant between clouds (and on-premises environments) can be confusing. 50% of organizations that took their information off public clouds and put them back on private clouds or on-premises architectures did so out of data security and compliance concerns. Leveraging industry frameworks (NIST, OWASP, MITRE ATT&CK) can help organizations tick the boxes for major compliance regulations, from NERC CIP to LGPD.
Unified visibility
With so many telemetries running across numerous environments, it can be hard to get all that aggregated data in one place. Teams have different tools for different places (on-premises SIEM, CNAPP for cloud, SaaS network monitoring for applications), making it difficult to see everything at once. Solutions like vulnerability management and offensive security techniques can help comprehensively spot weaknesses and XDR can bring all those telemetries into one centralized platform.
Access management
It’s almost inevitable to experience identity sprawl if you’re managing a hybrid environment. Certain identities exist on-premises, others exist in the cloud. Multiple identities floating around can vastly impact the size of your attack surface, drastically increasing your identity-related risk (compromised credentials accounted for 38% of all network break-ins last year). Organizations can turn to identity and access management (IAM) solutions to help control identities in hybrid architectures.
Incident response
Incident response can be tricky across multiple clouds and on-prem resources, simply because the lack of unified visibility means that different pieces of information (IOCs, IOAs) can be hard to immediately corroborate. When you need to gather pieces of information from different sources to vet an alert, for example, the threat could progress while you’re still figuring things out. A unified XDR platform can do a lot to bring those telemetries into one, and the 24/7monitoring that comes from qualified managed security service providers can also improve incident response in the cloud and across hybrid environments.
Misconfigurations
Because of the fluidity of a hybrid IT environment, misconfigurations can abound. Recent research found that 6% of organizations have misconfigurations in their cloud environments alone. Now, imagine having multiple clouds, or adding on the inevitable configuration errors that occur when deploying on-premises resources. Things like security configuration management (SCM) solutions can help organizations stay on track and spot configuration errors as soon as they occur, even changing them automatically so they maintain compliance and align with current policies.
Mastering the Art of Securing Hybrid Environments: They’re Not Going Anywhere
While adopting a hybrid IT approach presents security challenges, it also offers significant benefits. According to The 2025 State of Cloud, 82% of those “primarily using a hybrid strategy are happy with this, higher than for any other type of cloud.” Despite having to adjust to new attack vectors, points of failure, and security demands, the overarching upsides of leveraging a hybrid environment are enough that Gartner predicts a full 90% of organizations will be going hybrid through 2027.
Even though some businesses will hold out, hybrid environments are the inevitable wave of the future. The sooner organizations can adapt to hybrid environments and develop a strategy to secure them, the stronger their competitive advantage will be over those that fell behind. It takes practice, an awareness of the difficulties, and security vendors that anticipate the hybrid challenges with tools, talent, and team members that can fill the gaps.
To see what Fortra can do to help secure your hybrid environment, check out the Fortra platform, leverage our managed security services, or talk to an expert today.
