Cloud adoption has transformed how organisations build, deploy, and scale their operations. The flexibility and cost advantages are undeniable. What many businesses fail to recognise, however, is that moving to the cloud does not transfer security responsibility to the provider. Misconfigured cloud environments now account for a substantial majority of cloud-related data breaches.
The shared responsibility model defines the boundary between what the cloud provider secures and what falls to the customer. Providers protect the physical infrastructure, hypervisors, and core platform services. Customers own everything above that layer, including access controls, network configurations, data protection settings, and application security. Misunderstanding this boundary is where trouble begins.
Storage buckets represent one of the most commonly misconfigured resources. Organisations regularly leave cloud storage containers accessible to the public internet, sometimes containing customer databases, backup files, or application credentials. Automated scanning tools constantly sweep cloud provider address ranges searching for these exposed resources. When they find them, the data is harvested within hours.
Identity and access management misconfigurations rank alongside storage issues in severity. Overly permissive roles, unused service accounts with elevated privileges, and missing MFA requirements on administrative accounts all create pathways for attackers. A single compromised identity with excessive permissions can compromise an entire cloud environment.
Network security groups and firewall rules require careful configuration in cloud environments. Default settings often prioritise accessibility over security, leaving ports open that should be restricted. Organisations migrating from on-premises infrastructure sometimes replicate flat network architectures in the cloud, losing the segmentation benefits that cloud platforms readily provide.
Expert Commentary
William Fieldhouse | Director of Aardwolf Security Ltd
“Cloud misconfiguration is responsible for a staggering proportion of cloud-related breaches. The shared responsibility model confuses many organisations into assuming their provider handles security entirely. In practice, the customer owns the configuration, and one wrong setting can expose an entire environment to the public internet.”
Regular Azure penetration testing examines your specific cloud configuration against real-world attack techniques. Professional testers check for exposed management interfaces, misconfigured identity policies, overly permissive network rules, and data protection gaps that automated compliance tools frequently miss.
Infrastructure as code introduces both opportunities and risks. Defining cloud resources through templates enables consistency and repeatability, but security misconfigurations in templates propagate across every deployment that uses them. A single misconfigured template can create hundreds of vulnerable resources before anyone notices.
Similarly, AWS penetration testing validates that your Amazon Web Services environment resists the attacks that most commonly succeed against cloud deployments. Testers examine S3 bucket policies, IAM role configurations, VPC network designs, and serverless function permissions to identify exploitable weaknesses.
Cloud security posture management tools continuously monitor configurations against best practice benchmarks. These tools detect drift from secure baselines, flag non-compliant resources, and in some cases automatically remediate risky configurations. Deploying these tools early in cloud adoption prevents misconfigurations from accumulating into significant risk.
Cloud security is not inherently harder than on-premises security, but it is different. Organisations that invest in understanding the shared responsibility model, training their teams on cloud-native security practices, and testing their configurations regularly avoid the misconfigurations that plague less prepared competitors.
