Cloud security risks that should guide leadership in 2026

By –  Pavan Kushwaha, Founder & CEO, Threatcop & Kratikal

Cloud use has expanded at a pace that few organisations were ready for. Most critical functions now run on cloud platforms. Customer touchpoints, internal systems, analytics, product operations, all of it. The shift has brought efficiency. It has also brought exposure. Cloud incidents rose by 61 per cent in the past year. Nearly two-thirds of organisations dealt with at least one issue. For many leadership teams, cloud security has become the most difficult part of modernisation.

Misconfigurations Continue to Slip Through

Even experienced teams struggle with misconfigurations. Industry findings through 2025 show that a large share of cloud failures still start inside the organisation. Settings drift. Access rules change. Databases move. And the gaps go unnoticed. As environments scale across containers, virtual machines, serverless workloads and multiple cloud providers, manual oversight becomes nearly impossible. A single unchecked permission or exposed storage ...