CISOs in Asia face a rapidly evolving cloud security landscape, with the accelerated adoption of enterprise AI bringing unprecedented risks.
Palo Alto Networks' "State of Cloud Security Report 2025" reveals a stark reality: 99% of organisations have experienced an attack on their AI systems in the past year.
This surge is fuelled by the increasing use of AI-assisted coding, which, while boosting productivity, introduces insecure code at a pace security teams can't match.
Attackers are exploiting foundational cloud layers, targeting API infrastructure and identity management. API attacks have jumped by 41%, and lenient identity and access management (IAM) practices remain a top challenge, with 53% of respondents citing them as a leading vector for data exfiltration.
This is particularly concerning as agentic AI relies heavily on APIs, expanding the attack surface.
The report highlights the growing imperative for cloud and Security Operations Centre (SOC) unification. Tool sprawl, with an average of 17 cloud security tools from five vendors, creates blind spots and slows incident response.
"As organisations aggressively scale cloud investments to power AI initiatives, they are inadvertently opening the door to sophisticated new attack vectors... Teams need more than just dashboards highlighting risks they can never burn down; they must transform with an agentic-first platform that spans code to cloud to SOC to finally operate faster than the adversary," said Elad Koren, vice president of product management, Cortex at Palo Alto Networks.
For Asian CISOs, key steps include consolidating security tools, enforcing stricter IAM practices, and integrating cloud security with SOC workflows. The report emphasises the need for an end-to-end solution that merges proactive risk reduction with reactive incident response.
By embracing an agentic-first platform, organisations can operate at machine speed, staying ahead of AI-powered threats. Failing to adapt leaves cloud environments exposed, with attackers compromising environments in minutes while defenders take weeks to remediate.
