Key Takeaways
- 80% of breaches stem from IAM errors, public buckets (33%), and neglected VMs (95%).
- Multi-cloud environments require CSPM/CNAPP tools for unified AWS/Azure/GCP visibility.
- Conduct quarterly scans and enforce CI/CD guardrails to eliminate repeat vulnerabilities.
- Fidelis Halo automatically discovers assets via APIs and routes remediation directly to owners.
- Under shared responsibility, you manage configurations while providers secure infrastructure.
What Is a Cloud Security Assessment?
A cloud security assessment is a structured health check for your cloud environment. The aim is to understand how your cloud infrastructure, services, identities, and data are actually configured today, then compare that reality against what your security policies and frameworks expect. This evaluation strengthens your organization’s security posture and highlights areas where security controls need improvement.
In practice, this means looking at:
- How your cloud is put together: accounts, subscriptions, projects, VPCs/VNets, regions, and how they connect.
- Which identities (people, services, applications) exist and what they are allowed to do.
- How workloads like virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, and managed databases are configured and updated.
- Where sensitive data lives, how it moves, and what protects it — a fundamental part of protecting data.
- How you log activity, detect suspicious behavior, and respond when something goes wrong.
Because of the shared responsibility model, the focus is on the parts you actually control. The provider secures the physical layer and core platform. You are responsible for your use of that platform: access control, configuration, data handling, and monitoring.
Why Cloud Security Assessments Matter in 2026
Over the last few years, cloud has turned into the default platform for new projects, not just an experimental side channel. Most organizations now run a mix of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and a growing share of their critical data and processes reside there.
That shift has real consequences. 80% of cloud breaches still come from basic issues like overly permissive access, misconfigured services exposed to the internet, unpatched workloads, and blind spots in monitoring. The average cloud breach costs $4.45 million with detection times often exceeding 277 days for non-optimized environments.
Modern guidance from NIST SP 800-207 (Zero Trust), CISA BOD 25-01 (continuous monitoring), and CSA CCM v4 (197 controls) all point in the same direction: stop treating the cloud as a black box, and start treating it as a living environment that needs regular, structured assessment.
Key Components of a Cloud Security Assessment
Most mature assessments cover a few core areas of the cloud security assessment process:
Asset inventory
Build a current, accurate list of cloud assets: virtual machines (95% neglected VMs), containers, serverless functions, storage buckets (33% public), object stores, databases (38% exposed publicly), message queues, and edge services. This reduces hidden security gaps across cloud systems.
Configuration and architecture review
Compare current settings against CIS Benchmarks or NIST controls. Look at network layout, service exposure, default configurations, and multi-account designs — key parts of evaluating cloud security controls.
Identity and access management review
Examine accounts, roles (93% Kubernetes over-privileged service accounts), groups, policies (24% Lambda functions with AdminAccess), and usage patterns. Focus on admin paths and cross-account access. Strengthening access controls is crucial for reducing security risks.
Vulnerability and patch posture
Assess patch drift (58% organizations host 20+ year-old vulnerabilities) and known issues like Log4Shell remnants (32% assets unpatched >180 days).
Monitoring, detection, and response
Confirm logs are centralized and actionable per CISA SCuBA mandates (13% assets spawn 1,000+ attack paths undetected).
6 Critical Technical Signs to Watch For in Your Cloud Security Assessment
1. Inadequate Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Most cloud incidents involve identity abuse—a stolen key, over-privileged role, or forgotten service account that nobody is watching. 89% of organizations retain stale IAM credentials >90 days; non-human:human identity ratio hits 50:1.
Warning signs include:
- A long list of users or service principals with administrator or "owner" permissions.
- Multi-factor authentication only partly rolled out, or not enforced for high-risk accounts.
- Old access keys and accounts unused for months but remain active.
- Broad, catch-all policies instead of narrowly scoped rights (":" actions or wildcards across services).
On AWS, that usually surfaces in IAM user and role reviews, Access Analyzer findings, and cross-account role assumptions. In Azure, you see it in Azure AD assignments, Privileged Identity Management, and app registrations. In GCP, it appears in project-level bindings and service account roles.
During the assessment, focus on reducing standing privilege, cleaning up unused identities, and enforcing MFA consistently. Strong IAM greatly reduces data breaches and identity-related security measures failures.
2. Misconfigured Cloud Resources and Public Exposure
76% of environments have public-facing assets enabling lateral movement. Misconfigurations are still the fastest route from “secure enough” to “headline breach.” The pattern is familiar: a storage bucket, database, or admin interface that was supposed to be internal quietly ends up reachable from the internet, often for years.
Typical issues you should look for:
- S3 buckets or Blob Storage left public when they hold backups, logs, or customer data (33% public buckets).
- Databases and VMs with security groups wide open to 0.0.0.0/0 on SSH/RDP/HTTP ports.
- Critical services running default settings—web apps, message queues, API gateways (82% unpatched).
CSPM tools make this easier to spot at scale, but even basic provider tools like AWS Config, Azure Policy, or Google Cloud’s Security Command Center will surface the biggest risks. The goal is a short list of exposed resources plus templates to stop the same mistakes.
The outcome of this part of the assessment should be clear: a list of specific resources that are more exposed than they should be, and a small set of patterns or templates to prevent the same problems from reappearing.
- Find misconfigurations fast
- Get unified multi-cloud visibility
- Automate CIS/NIST compliance checks
- Cut exposure with continuous monitoring
3. Unpatched and Neglected Cloud Assets
Cloud makes it easy to create new resources; it does not automatically retire them. Over time, almost every organization accumulates “forgotten” assets: old test environments, one-off projects, manual workarounds that never got cleaned up (95% neglected VMs).
Things to call out in the assessment:
- Operating systems that are beyond end-of-support or far behind on critical security updates (32% assets unpatched >180 days).
- Known, easily exploitable vulnerabilities present in externally facing services (58% organizations host 20+ year-old vulns).
- Instances or containers that are not covered by your normal patching, configuration management, or endpoint protection tools.
- Unused instances, snapshots, and volumes that contain real data but are not monitored.
A good approach is to treat this as both a hygiene issue and a design issue. Hygiene means tightening your asset inventory and patch processes so neglected workloads are less likely to slip through the net. Design means using automation and infrastructure as code so that test environments and temporary workloads are easy to tear down when they are no longer needed.
4. Weak Data Protection and Encryption Practices
Data protection is where security, privacy, and compliance all collide. During the assessment, you want a clear map of where sensitive data lives, how it is protected, and where those protections break down (38% sensitive databases exposed).
Questions to answer include:
- Are storage services and databases that hold sensitive or regulated data using encryption at rest, and are keys managed appropriately?
- Is traffic between users, services, and regions consistently protected with modern TLS, including internal service-to-service traffic where possible?
- Who has the ability to read, export, or delete sensitive data, and is that access model deliberate or accidental?
- Do you have basic data classification in place, and does that classification drive technical controls?
Weaknesses here can turn an otherwise minor security incident into a major breach. If, for example, backups are not encrypted or logs contain large volumes of plain-text personal data, then a single misconfiguration can have regulatory consequences that far outweigh the immediate technical impact.
Cloud-native key management services, tokenization, and DLP can all help if they are used consistently. The assessment should highlight where that consistency breaks down.
5. Insufficient Monitoring, Logging, and Incident Response Preparation
If you cannot see what is happening in your cloud environment, you are effectively running blind. Logging and monitoring are what turn isolated configuration checks into an ongoing cloud security posture (13% assets spawn 1,000+ attack paths undetected).
When reviewing this area, look at:
- Whether audit, activity, and access logs are enabled for core services and control planes, and how long they are retained.
- How logs from different accounts, regions, and providers are collected and correlated.
- What constitutes a "high-priority" alert, and how those alerts are routed and handled.
- Whether your security operations team has tested playbooks that specifically address cloud scenarios, rather than only on-premise events.
It is also worth checking how quickly you could investigate a realistic cloud incident. For example, if someone reports suspicious behavior in a production workload, can you quickly trace which identity made which API calls, from where, and against which resources? If the answer is “not really,” the assessment should call that out as a concrete risk, not an abstract nice-to-have.
6. Complex or Inconsistent Cloud Security Policies and Governance
Finally, even strong technical controls can erode if they are not backed by clear, consistent governance. Many organizations have solid cloud security tooling but uneven adoption across teams and projects.
Signs that policy and governance need work:
- Different business units using different patterns for basic things like network layout, IAM roles, and logging—even within the same provider.
- Cloud security standards that look good on paper but do not appear in templates, pipelines, or guardrails.
- Assessments that repeat the same findings quarter after quarter because ownership and follow-through are unclear.
- Limited alignment with recognized frameworks such as NIST, CSA CCM, or CIS, making it harder to explain your posture to auditors or leadership.
During the assessment, it helps to identify not just gaps, but also the minimum set of shared patterns your organization will commit to across all cloud environments. That might include a standard landing zone design, a small number of approved IAM patterns, and a single, agreed-upon checklist for future assessments.
How Companies Assess Risk Across Multiple Cloud Providers
Most organizations now rely on more than one cloud provider, even if that was not the original plan. That reality adds another layer of complexity to risk assessment: the basic concepts are the same, but each platform has its own tools and its own quirks.
A practical multi-cloud assessment usually combines:
- A central view from a CSPM or CNAPP platform that normalizes misconfigurations, identity risks, and exposure across providers.
- Native services such as AWS Config, Azure Policy, and Google Cloud Security Command Center for deep, provider-specific insights.
- A single, shared framework (for example, NIST CSF plus CSA CCM) to describe risk management in a way that makes sense to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
The objective is to be able to answer simple questions—like “where are we most exposed today?” or “what changed since the last assessment?”—without having to manually stitch together three separate pictures every time.
Where Fidelis Halo® Makes Multi-Cloud Assessments Easier
Multi-cloud means juggling different consoles and configs across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Fidelis Halo® cuts through that by auto-discovering assets everywhere through native APIs—no agents needed. It normalizes the risks into one dashboard, runs CIS benchmarks plus HIPAA/PCI checks, spots exposure paths, and pings the right system owners with fix instructions.
Teams using it say assessments become faster and scale better since you’re not stitching reports together manually.
Complete Cloud Security Assessment Checklist
- Phase 1: Discovery
- Inventory all workloads
- Map sensitive data flows
- Document account structure
- Phase 2: Technical Assessment
- IAM audit (privilege/MFA)
- Network exposure scan
- Vulnerability scan (CVSS≥7)
- Penetration testing
- Phase 3: Governance & Operations
- Policy standardization
- Incident response validation
- Business continuity testing
- Continuous monitoring
Making Cloud Security Assessments Work Long-Term
A single assessment report gathers dust. Real progress comes from treating it like a quarterly pulse check—track fixes, feed findings into CI/CD and IaC templates, make “secure by default” the norm instead of after-the-fact cleanup.
Done consistently, your team stops chasing the same fires. Leadership sees risk trends instead of snapshots. Auditors move on to harder questions. And late at night, you know your cloud can handle whatever 2026 throws at it.
Frequently Ask Questions
How often should organizations perform a cloud security assessment?
Most mature teams perform assessments quarterly. High-change environments or regulated industries may require monthly assessments to maintain compliance and reduce emerging risks.
Do cloud security assessments help with compliance audits?
Yes. Assessments map misconfigurations, identity risks, and gaps against frameworks like CIS, NIST, and CSA, making audit preparation faster and reducing last-minute remediation work.
Can smaller teams perform effective cloud security assessments without dedicated cloud security engineers?
Yes. Automated posture management tools, predefined CIS benchmarks, and managed detection services help small teams maintain strong cloud hygiene with limited resources.
