Commissioned by Scale Venture Partners
Published May 2024
Executive summary
The shift to the cloud, like most transformational technologies, has been a slow transition over the past decade. In the past five years, we’ve seen more enterprises making the shift to cloud-based infrastructure and applications and, as they do, they become reliant on third-party cloud providers, opening new vulnerabilities and areas of exposure that didn’t exist before.
As CISOs seek stable ground in the face of increasing cloud complexity, a new trend has emerged: AI acts as an accelerant, promising efficiency, automation, and a lower barrier to entry for both defenders and attackers.
In order to keep up with threat actors, CISOs are increasingly looking at AI to improve their own security posture, with 89% of security leaders indicating that AI is important to improving their security in 2025.
As these trends converge, Scale Venture Partners has conducted ongoing research to understand the challenges CISOs are facing and how solutions are evolving. Now in its 11th year, this year’s report consolidates perspectives from CISOs, CIOs, VPs, directors, and IT managers.
Our research shows more security incidents, with 76% of companies reporting three or more security incident types. Cloud infrastructure security reclaimed the top priority spot for CISOs, and data center/server security jumped in importance from 8th in 2023 to second.
While we’re still in the early days of AI adoption, CISOs are taking a proactive stance.
Although budget growth has slowed, enterprises allocated 29% more budget toward new, innovative, and experimental security solutions this year.
In the face of increased threats, contracting budgets, and continued talent shortages, CISOs are strategizing to ensure they don’t fall behind in the AI arms race while navigating security in the age of cloud apps and cloud infrastructure.
Scale Venture Partners commissioned Everclear Marketing and Osterman Research to conduct a survey of 300 security leaders in the United States who are responsible for buying decisions, the success of security deployments, or the overall security of the company.
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