Navigating Cloud Security: Risk Management & Compliance Best Practices

Feb 17, 2025

Cloud security risk and compliance are critical for protecting data, applications, and infrastructure in cloud environments. Organizations must balance security risks with regulatory compliance requirements to ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and availability.

1. Cloud Security Risks

Cloud environments introduce unique risks that require robust security controls.

A. Common Cloud Security Risks

Misconfigurations – Open storage buckets, insecure IAM policies, and excessive permissions.

Data Breaches – Unauthorized access to sensitive data due to weak encryption, access control failures, or misconfigurations.

Insider Threats – Malicious or negligent employees exposing or misusing data.

Insecure APIs – Poorly secured APIs exposing cloud services to cyberattacks.

Account Hijacking – Weak credentials, lack of MFA, or phishing attacks leading to compromised cloud accounts.

Lack of Visibility & Monitoring – Incomplete logging and lack of real-time security monitoring in multi-cloud environments.

Compliance Violations – Failure to meet regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS).

Shadow IT – Unauthorized cloud applications creating security blind spots.

Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks – Attackers overwhelming cloud resources, causing downtime.

Data Loss – Unintentional deletion, lack of backups, or cloud provider failures.

2. Cloud Compliance Frameworks

Organizations must adhere to various security and compliance standards based on industry and geographical regulations.

A. Key Compliance Frameworks

3. Best Practices for Cloud Security & Compliance

To mitigate risks and ensure compliance, organizations should implement the following best practices:

A. Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Enforce least privilege access (CIEM - Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management).

Use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all privileged accounts.

Monitor inactive or excessive permissions and remove them.

B. Data Protection & Encryption

Encrypt data at rest and in transit using strong encryption (AES-256, TLS 1.2/1.3).

Implement Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to detect and block unauthorized data transfers.

Secure APIs with OAuth, OpenID, and API gateways.

C. Continuous Monitoring & Threat Detection

Deploy SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) for real-time logging and monitoring.

Use CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) tools to detect misconfigurations.

Leverage EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) & XDR for proactive threat hunting.

D. Network Security

Implement Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) to restrict access based on identity and risk level. Use Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and DDoS protection to secure cloud workloads.

Enable Cloud-Native Security Controls (AWS Security Hub, Azure Defender, Google Security Command Center).

E. Compliance Automation & Auditing

Conduct regular security audits and penetration testing.

Implement Compliance-as-Code (IaC) for automated security enforcement.

Ensure vendor security assessments for third-party cloud providers.

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In Cloud Most Incidents are Related to Risks Known to the Organization à

The high volume of alerts, combined with tedious and manual remediation processes, has security teams constantly fighting an ever-growing risk backlog. As a result, an increasing number of incidents are directly related to risks known to the organization – meaning the security team was previously aware of the issue and had an open ticket for remediation when the incident occurred, but the fix had not been implemented

Remediation Takes Months, Attackers Only Need Days à

Today security teams are struggling to efficiently remediate cloud security risks. The process is extremely manual, time consuming, and in some cases, impossible. While it takes security teams months to remediate vulnerabilities, it only takes attackers days to exploit them. According to studies, the average time-to-exploit (TTE) is now just 5 days (compared to 32 days the previous year), highlighting the accelerating pace at which attackers are evolving compared to defenders.

On average, it takes organizations 10X longer to remediate open vulnerabilities than it takes attackers to exploit it.

Prioritization and analytics

3.5 weeks is the time to remediate a misconfiguration in production, according to studies.

6 weeks is the time to remediate an application vulnerability in production, according to studies.

Over 6 to 8+ weeks is the time to remediate an application vulnerability in production, according to studies.

The True Cost of Remediation is Staggering à

While difficult to quantify, the insights from this survey can help us better understand the cost of remediation. By focusing solely on direct operational expenses – excluding both incident-related costs and missed opportunities while teams focus on manual remediation tasks (instead of strategic or revenue-generating initiatives e.g. product development or scalability) — we can estimate the annual operational costs associated with remediation.

Shifting Focus to Reduce Cloud Incidents à

The visibility problem has been solved—today’s security teams know about their risks. Still, vulnerability exploitation continues to be one of the most common ways attackers gain initial access. Visibility is not security and the focus has now shifted from visibility to action. Security teams are actively implementing new strategies to increase remediation efficiency, reduce risk acceptance, and minimize overall exposure. Survey respondents highlighted these three strategies key to reducing exposure.