As cyberthreats increase in both scale and sophistication, breach rates have surged to 55 percent during the past year, representing a 17% year-on-year (YoY) rise, with AI-generated attacks emerging as a key driver of this growth.
This is according to a report from Gigamon, which tapped Vitreous World for an online survey of 1,021 global respondents February 21- Mar. 7, 2025. Respondents were based in Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Findings show that security and IT teams are being pushed to a breaking point. The economic cost of cybercrime is now estimated to be $3 trillion worldwide according to the World Economic Forum.
As AI-enabled adversaries grow more agile, organisations are challenged with ineffective and inefficient tools, fragmented cloud environments, and limited intelligence.
The study found that AI’s role in escalating network complexity and accelerating risk is evident. Among respondents, 46 percent say managing AI-generated threats is now their top security priority.
One in three organisations report that network data volumes have more than doubled in the past two years due to AI workloads, while nearly half of all respondents (47%) are seeing a rise in attacks targeting their organisation’s large language model (LLM) deployments.
More than half (58%) say they’ve seen a surge in AI-powered ransomware—up from 41% in 2024 underscoring how adversaries are exploiting AI to outpace and outflank existing defenses.
Also, compromises highlight continued trade-offs in foundational areas of hybrid cloud security. Among Singaporean respondents, 96% concede that they need to make compromises in securing and managing their hybrid cloud infrastructure. The key challenges that create these compromises include the lack of clean, high-quality data to support secure AI workload deployment (46%) and lack of comprehensive insight and visibility across their environments, including lateral movement in East-West traffic (47%).
Further, public cloud risks prompt industry recalibration. Once considered an acceptable risk in the rush to scale post-COVID operations, the public cloud is now coming under increasingly intense scrutiny.
Many organisations are rethinking their cloud strategies in the face of their growing exposure, with 71% of security and IT leaders in Singapore now viewing the public cloud as a greater risk than any other environment.
As a result, 76% of Singaporean respondents report their organisation is actively considering repatriating data from public to private cloud due to security concerns and 54% are reluctant to use AI in public cloud environments, citing fears around intellectual property protection.
In addition, visibility is top of mind for security leaders. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, the limitations of existing security tools are coming sharply into focus.
Organisations are shifting their priorities toward gaining complete visibility into their environments, a capability now seen as crucial for effective threat detection and response.
More than half (55%) of respondents lack confidence in their current tools’ ability to detect breaches, citing limited visibility as the core issue. As a result, 64% say their number one focus for the next 12 months is achieving real-time threat monitoring and delivering through having complete visibility into all data in motion.
With AI driving unprecedented traffic volumes, risk, and complexity, 89% of Security and IT leaders cite deep observability as fundamental to securing and managing hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Executive leadership is taking notice, as boards increasingly prioritise complete visibility into all data in motion, with 88% of Singaporean respondents confirming that deep observability is now being discussed at the board level to better protect hybrid cloud environments.
