The findings are part of the global 2022 Cloud Security Report.Compared to other industries, the manufacturing sector turned out to be more prone to account compromise and supply chain attacks within 

the last year: 38 percent of respondents in this sector had to deal with account compromise at least once, while the average for all other industries was 31 percent. Similarly, 19 percent of manufacturing organizations experienced supply chain compromise but only 15 percent of respondents from other verticals reported this type of attack. "The most common reason for cloud adoption in the manufacturing sector (cited by 57 percent of respondents) is supporting remote workers.  Business pressure to grant remote access quickly to many workers leads to a wider attack surface and might be the root cause for the increased  number of account compromise attacks," comments Dirk Schrader, VP of security research at Netwrix. "To mitigate this risk, manufacturing organizations should pay closer attention to identity management, especially for privileged accounts. A zero standing privilege approach is particularly effective in this situation since it creates accounts only on request and deletes them once the specified task is completed."

The survey also shows that cloud adoption in the manufacturing sector is progressing slower than in other markets. Indeed, while on average 41 percent of workloads are already in the cloud, manufacturing organizations have moved only 35 percent of their operations there. Lack of budget is the main factor slowing cloud adoption; 45 percent of respondents in this industry highlighted this reason, compared to 35 percent overall.