ANZ Organisations Reassess Hybrid Cloud Security as AI-Driven Threats Escalate

Organisations across Australia and New Zealand are reassessing their approach to hybrid cloud security as AI-driven cyber threats continue to rise, according to new global research from Gigamon.

The company’s 2026 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey found AI is now involved in 83 percent of security breaches globally, while organisations across the region are facing increasing pressure to secure distributed cloud environments, encrypted traffic, and AI workloads.

The report surveyed more than 1,000 Security and IT leaders globally, including respondents from Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.

According to the ANZ-focused findings, 91 percent of Australian security leaders are recalibrating hybrid cloud risk in response to AI-driven threats, while more than half of Australian organisations experienced a breach in the past year.

The findings reflect broader regional concerns around operational resilience, data sovereignty, and visibility into increasingly complex cloud environments.

Gigamon’s report argues that many organisations have developed a false sense of security as AI adoption accelerates faster than governance and visibility capabilities.

Globally, 65 percent of organisations experienced a breach in the past year, despite widespread investment in cybersecurity tooling and governance programs.

At the same time, nearly three-quarters of organisations reported limited visibility into AI-driven data flows across hybrid cloud environments.

The report also found that organisations are increasingly wary of public cloud AI deployments, with more than 70 percent reluctant to deploy AI in public cloud environments due to concerns around intellectual property leakage and visibility.

As a result, many organisations are shifting toward data lakes and reassessing where sensitive AI workloads should reside.

AI is also becoming deeply embedded in security operations themselves.

Nearly all respondents reported using AI to autonomously initiate security functions such as alert triage and prioritisation, reflecting how security teams are increasingly relying on automation to address skills shortages and operational complexity.

However, the report warns that fragmented visibility across cloud, data centre, and AI environments is slowing incident response and making it harder to determine root cause following breaches.

More than 40 percent of respondents said it now takes longer to detect and investigate breaches, while 27 percent said they could not determine root cause at all.

Gigamon said the findings highlight the growing importance of “deep observability” — combining network-derived telemetry with traditional monitoring and logging systems to create a more complete picture of how data moves across hybrid cloud environments.

The report also points to increasing concern around future quantum-related threats, with 87 percent of respondents worried about “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks targeting encrypted data.

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