Security Problems in Cloud Computing: Expert Insights

We open with clear definitions so executives and technical leaders can align on risks versus threats and practical challenges. A risk is a potential for loss; a threat is an adversary or attack technique. A challenge is an implementation hurdle that affects usability.

We believe evidence matters. Through 2025, 99% of failures will involve some level of human error. The average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024. Those facts show why alignment matters.

Our approach links risk assessments and telemetry to business outcomes. We focus on reducing exposure, defending against active threats, and operationalizing controls that scale across platforms and services.

In short: prioritize least privilege access, continuous monitoring, and rapid response. We act as a collaborative partner to translate strategy into action and balance protection with performance.

• We clarify risks, threats, and challenges so leaders can set priorities.
• Human error drives most failures; training and process matter.
• Telemetry and assessments connect technical findings to business impact.
• Least privilege, consistent controls, and monitoring are core practices.
• Uniform governance is essential across multi-provider platforms and services.

Leaders need a focused view of the most material risks and fast steps they can take to reduce exposure while keeping projects moving. We translate technical findings into business priorities so teams can act without slowing delivery.

What decision‑makers want: a concise list of threats, practical measures to lower exposure, and a roadmap for controls that scale across services and providers.

The essential traits of cloud platforms—on‑demand self‑service, broad network access, and rapid elasticity—expand the attack surface. Each new integration or service can become an entry point for attacks or data loss.

Reduced visibility compared to on‑premises systems shifts monitoring to workload, identity, and API telemetry. Network taps alone are no longer enough.

Frictionless provisioning also fuels shadow IT. Users can spin up unapproved services that increase the chance of malware or data exfiltration unless we pair enablement with governance, visibility, and policy guardrails.

• Map responsibility across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS so organizations know where controls and provider obligations begin.
• Measure progress by risk reduction, mean time to detect/respond, and strength of access controls across applications and infrastructure.

We separate exposures, adversaries, and operational hurdles so teams can act with clarity.

Risk is a potential for loss or a weak spot—an exposed resource or misconfigured policy that invites harm.

Threat describes an attacker or specific attack technique that targets those weak spots.

Challenge covers the operational realities of scaling controls, governance, and user behavior.

The division of duties shifts by service: SaaS delegates most platform duties to the provider, PaaS shares runtime and platform controls, and IaaS places more configuration and data duties on the consumer.

• We formalize the taxonomy so cross‑functional teams speak the same language about risks, threats, and challenges.
• We map controls to show which access, configuration, and data protections your organization must own versus what the provider delivers.
• We enforce governance by translating policies into controls and validating configurations and access continually.

Insufficient due diligence about these divisions causes many incidents—assuming a provider manages keys or data end‑to‑end is a common gap.

Our strategy aligns people, processes, and systems so decisions are documented, tested, and measured across services and infrastructure.

Rapid service growth and multi‑provider footprints create more outward-facing endpoints than most inventories track.

Microservices and public workloads increase the attack surface and reveal metadata (DNS, object names) that aids reconnaissance. We must map assets continuously, not rely on periodic scans.

Traditional network taps miss east‑west traffic and managed services. To regain visibility, we collect workload and API‑level telemetry and correlate identities, access paths, and data flows.

• Governance for shadow IT: pair fast enablement with discovery, tagging, and automated guardrails.
• Visibility controls: monitor exposed services, APIs, storage permissions, and public ingress/egress.
• Continuous surface management: enumerate assets, classify sensitivity, and reduce exposure for critical data stores.

We tie attack surface management to incident response so alerts trigger investigations and control updates. For a concise primer on the broader risks and best practices, see our reference on cloud risk fundamentals.

Through 2025, 99% of failures will involve human error. Rapid provisioning, shadow IT, and differing defaults across providers make misconfigurations common. We focus on preventative controls and clear processes rather than blame.

Common root causes include public storage, permissive IAM roles and policies, disabled encryption, and unintended exposure via default settings. These lead to data exposure and unauthorized access to applications and services.

How we reduce risk:

• Enforce baseline controls and policy-as-code to standardize secure defaults across providers and services.
• Design roles for least privilege, decoupled from any single IAM product, and run periodic access reviews to curb privilege creep.
• Embed automated drift detection and preventive checks in CI/CD to block risky configuration changes before deployment.
• Apply strict change management: approvals, segregation of duties, rollback paths, and human-centered training that makes secure choices intuitive.
• Promote a blameless culture that treats incidents as learning opportunities and strengthens processes and management after errors.

Outcome: Consistent policies, automated controls, and clear role design reduce vulnerabilities and help organizations protect data and information while maintaining agility.

Data loss and breaches often start where encryption or lifecycle controls are weakest. We focus on practical steps to stop exposures and ensure recoverability.

Encryption that protects transit but not stored copies leaves records exposed. Poor key management magnifies that exposure and can trigger heavy compliance penalties.

Verify deletion: audit provider retention, use cryptographic erasure where available, and remove old object versions to reduce residual traces.

Backups, recovery objectives, and provider outages

Backups must match business RTO and RPO. Cross‑region replication and periodic restores prove you can recover from provider failures or physical loss.

• Tier sensitive information with tokenization, envelope encryption, and just‑in‑time access for privileged users.
• Align backups to tested disaster plans and review SLAs for availability and recovery obligations.
• Map breach paths to upstream controls—identity, network routes, and workload hardening—to prevent escalation by attackers.

Outcome: These measures reduce loss, limit attacker avenues, and help preserve customer trust after an incident.

Account takeover now ranks among the fastest‑growing vectors for lateral movement and data exfiltration. Stolen credentials let attackers provision resources or target privileged assets, so access management must be deliberate and measurable.

Role design and privileged access

We design roles from business functions first, then map them into provider IAM. This approach yields true least privilege and shrinks blast radius.

We operationalize PAM: vault credentials, enforce MFA, rotate secrets, use short‑lived tokens, and monitor privileged sessions for anomalies.

Credential theft and session abuse

• Close session abuse gaps with device posture checks, conditional access, phishing‑resistant MFA, and timeouts.
• Enforce password hygiene, automated detection of impossible travel, and atypical API use to flag risky logins.
• Secure service identities and APIs with scoped permissions and periodic re‑attestation for machine‑to‑machine flows.

We tie identity telemetry to incident response so teams can quickly contain hijacked accounts, stop privilege escalation across environments, and protect data and assets for the organization.

Publicly reachable control planes magnify risk when apis lack strict validation and access controls. CSP management endpoints exposed to the internet face routine scans and automated attacks. Typical software vulnerabilities make them attractive targets for adversaries.

We focus on hardening administrative paths and testing isolation across tenants. Exploits that compromise hypervisors, platform layers, or applications can lead to tenant isolation failures; proof‑of‑concepts have shown this is feasible even when large cross‑tenant breaches are rare.

• Enforce strong auth, fine‑grained authorization, schema validation, and rate limiting through API gateways.
• Adopt secure defaults, input validation, and virtual patching while software fixes are applied.
• Evaluate multi‑tenancy tradeoffs: logical isolation, noisy neighbor impact, and shared infrastructure when accepting risks.
• Define customer responsibilities: encrypt sensitive data, scope access, and monitor API activity to detect anomalous calls.
• Test for lateral movement across applications and environments to confirm isolation holds under failure modes.

Outcome: These controls reduce exploitability and give teams measurable ways to protect management planes, infrastructure, and tenant data while working with providers and platform services.

Insiders and persistent adversaries exploit trust, misconfigurations, and visibility gaps to cause the most damaging incidents. This trio—authorized abuse, long‑term footholds, and volume attacks—affects availability and data confidentiality across cloud estates.

Not all insider events are deliberate. Negligent users make risky changes; malicious insiders misuse privileges.

We design layered measures: segregation of duties, just‑in‑time elevation, and detailed activity logging to deter and detect abuse.

Periodic access reviews and clear reporting channels reduce risk while preserving trust across teams and providers.

APTs establish undetected presence to exfiltrate sensitive data over months. They begin with zero‑days, stolen credentials, or misconfigurations and move laterally slowly.

• Shorten dwell time with continuous monitoring, threat hunting, and anomaly detection tied to identity and workload telemetry.
• Forensic readiness means centralized logs, immutable storage, and preserved context so incidents can be reconstructed across systems and environments.

Defending availability requires a layered approach to DoS and DDoS attacks. We recommend autoscaling with controlled limits, upstream mitigation (rate limits, scrubbing), and resilient designs that degrade gracefully.

Combined, these measures help us detect insiders and attackers sooner, protect critical data, and restore services with confidence while keeping teams empowered to move fast.

Vendor choices can lock teams into formats and APIs that slow future change and raise operational cost. This dynamic grows as organizations adopt deeper managed services and proprietary tools.

We assess lock‑in drivers—unique apis, proprietary configurations, and embedded service hooks—and recommend portability patterns and abstraction layers. These patterns reduce migration friction and lower the chance of vendor‑led outages or loss of control.

We evaluate provider supply chains to confirm that requirements cascade to subcontractors. Contractual guardrails (export tools, data format transparency, and exit plans) protect the organization if a supplier changes offerings or fails to meet obligations.

We map controls to mandates such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and FedRAMP and translate them into actionable measures across users, applications, and environments. Integrating compliance into delivery pipelines gives teams automated checks and continuous evidence collection.

Reducing operational risk starts with well-defined baselines, measurable checks, and repeatable processes. We focus on actions that teams can automate and measure so business initiatives keep pace with protection goals.

We define secure baselines as code and enforce them via automation. Continuous posture management detects drift and remediates across infrastructure and platform services.

Practical activities include baseline templates, policy-as-code, and automated change gates integrated into CI/CD.

We operationalize monitoring with centralized logs and enriched context so threat hunting becomes routine. Real-time analytics let teams trace access and data flows quickly.

Regular vulnerability assessments, pen tests, and tabletop exercises validate that tools and processes stop real threats before they escalate.

We recommend CNAPP to unify visibility across workloads, identities, applications, and data. This shortens mean time to detect and respond in complex estates.

We harden APIs with gateways, auth, schema validation, and rate limiting. Container defenses include image scanning, runtime controls, and least-privilege roles in build pipelines.

• Enforce MFA, conditional access, and automated entitlement reviews to close access gaps.
• Make backups immutable and test restores frequently to ensure recoverability for critical data paths.
• Document accepted risk, prioritize controls, and update posture metrics as services evolve.

Outcome: These practices and tools give organizations measurable control over exposure, reduce mean time to detect, and help align protection with business and compliance goals.

A resilient posture depends on clear roles, measurable controls, and an operational plan that scales with growth.

Effective cloud security starts with knowing which controls the consumer must own under shared models and addressing unique risks such as reduced visibility, exposed management APIs, multi‑tenancy, and incomplete deletion.

We recommend a balanced strategy that blends prevention, detection, and response to protect data, systems, and business operations. Priority measures include least‑privilege access, secure configuration as code, continuous monitoring, and tested recovery plans to limit damage and lower risk.

We prepare executives and technical teams to act decisively, preserve customer trust, and sequence pragmatic wins alongside long‑term architecture work.

As your partner, we advance maturity with measurable outcomes that support growth, compliance, and resilient operations.