Cloud security encompasses the strategies, controls, and technologies designed to protect cloud-based infrastructure, applications, and data from threats. As organizations migrate workloads to cloud platforms, the security model shifts from protecting a defined network perimeter to securing distributed resources across shared infrastructure, requiring a fundamentally different approach to security architecture.
How It Works
Cloud security operates under a shared responsibility model. The cloud provider secures the underlying infrastructure: physical data centers, hypervisors, and network hardware. The customer is responsible for securing everything they build on top: operating system configurations, application code, data encryption, access controls, and network policies. Many cloud security incidents result from misunderstanding this boundary and assuming the provider handles security aspects that are actually the customer's responsibility.
Identity and access management (IAM) is the cornerstone of cloud security. Every resource, service, and API in the cloud is controlled through IAM policies that define who can access what and under which conditions. Overly permissive IAM policies are one of the most common cloud security misconfigurations. A single overprivileged service account can provide an attacker with broad access across an entire cloud environment.
Common cloud-specific vulnerabilities include misconfigured storage buckets exposing sensitive data to the public internet, overly permissive security groups acting as effectively open firewalls, unencrypted data stores, exposed metadata endpoints that leak credentials, and serverless functions with excessive permissions. Each cloud platform introduces its own unique attack surface and configuration pitfalls.
Why It Matters
Cloud misconfigurations are responsible for a significant percentage of data breaches. The speed and ease of provisioning cloud resources often outpaces security review, creating gaps that attackers exploit. Security assessments of cloud environments evaluate IAM configurations, network segmentation, data encryption, logging coverage, and service-specific settings to identify exposures that could lead to unauthorized access or data compromise.
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