As organizations increasingly migrate to the cloud, security leaders must navigate evolving threats while maintaining control over their digital environments. It is a common fallacy that cloud environments require a fundamentally different security approach. Instead, they shift lower layers of responsibility from the customer to the vendor. The same zero-trust philosophy, using a risk-based approach, should be followed for solutions and services delivered regardless of their delivery source; “on-premises” or co-located facilities, or cloud services. A key challenge is that this approach is not effectively implemented in existing on-premises environments, much less adopted when migrating to cloud services.[1]

Cybersecurity threats in the cloud are growing at an alarming rate. Recent studies reveal:

  • 45% of data breaches are now cloud-based, marking a 30% increase from previous years.[2]
  • Inconsistent cloud security configuration or “misconfigurations’ have led to over 69% of companies suffering a breach.[3]
  • The average total cost of a cloud breach exceeds $4 million, including downtime and reputational damage.[4]
  • Ransomware attacks on cloud environments have surged by 105% in the past year alone.

These numbers highlight a growing trend — cloud environments are increasingly targeted, often due to misconfigurations and a lack of proactive risk management. This primer outlines core cloud security principles, risk considerations, and actionable strategies for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to secure cloud environments effectively.

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Key Cloud Security Challenges

  1. Solution Confusion: Infrastructure (IaaS), Platform (PaaS), Software (SaaS), or Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)?
  2. Understanding Roles and Responsibilities: Existing “traditional” teams are often confused about their roles and responsibilities with regards to the cloud, and organizations remain uninformed about their responsibilities vs the vendors’ depending upon the solution.
  3. Lack of Asset Visibility: Without a comprehensive inventory of cloud assets, organizations struggle to track critical workloads and sensitive data.
  4. Misconfigurations and Human Error: Cloud environments are highly dynamic, and misconfigurations remain a leading cause of breaches.
  5. Unauthorized Access & Insider Threats: Traditional perimeter-based security models never worked on-premises “on-prem” to begin with, so why should we rely on them in the cloud. We need a new approach, following ZTA.
  6. Compliance and Regulatory Challenges: Cloud adoption often introduces complexities in meeting industry and legal compliance requirements.
  7. Evolving Threat Landscape: Attackers continuously develop new tactics targeting cloud-specific vulnerabilities, requiring proactive threat management.

 

Integrating Cloud Security

1. Understand Your Risk: Inventory what you are using

  • Conduct a system inventory to identify systems, solutions, and business services living in, or dependent on cloud services.
  • Ensure contracts for the services used are available and have been reviewed within an appropriate timeframe.
  • Review the contracts and terms of service for customer responsibilities. Consider the Customer User Entity Controls if listed and verify their implementation and operation by your organization’s responsible team.
  • Determine whether the controls implemented and managed by the team are adequate for the type of solution or service, including the data transmitted and stored.

2. Leverage Risk and Threat Registers

  • Update the organization’s risk register and threat register to include risks associated with cloud services. This helps prioritize remediation efforts by aligning risk management activities with business objectives, ensuring that resources are directed toward addressing the most critical challenges first.
  • For organizations without such tools, establish a structured risk management program as part of broader IT Governance.

 

3. Follow a Zero-Trust Philosophy

Zero-Trust is a philosophy and a journey, not a product. A great first step on the path is enforcing the primary tenet that no identity — internal or external — is inherently trusted. Ensure you have strong identity practices:

  • Enforce least privilege access with strong identity and access management (IAM) controls. This includes the identity on-boarding and off-boarding process.
  • Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) across all critical services.
  • Implement an Identity Provider Solution (IdP) to enable Single-Sign-On (SSO) across critical services.
  • Continuously verify user and device trust leveraging behavior analytics.
  • Apply network segmentation and preferably micro-segmentation to restrict lateral movement within cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments.

4. Asset Management & Operational Visibility

Many stakeholders argue that their cloud environments are ephemeral, making workload inventories obsolete the moment they are created. However, cloud asset management should be viewed similarly to location tracking: while individual workloads may come and go, organizations must know what is supposed to be running, where it is running, the resources it consumes, and for how long. By trending this information with business intelligence software, security teams can detect anomalies that impact both operational quality and security.

  • Conduct automated asset discovery and maintain a dynamic inventory.
  • Classify data and workloads based on sensitivity and regulatory requirements.
  • Implement continuous monitoring to detect unauthorized changes.
  • Track workload execution in real-time to identify deviations from expected behavior.
  • Create a tiered Security and Operations Risk dashboard that integrates on-premises and cloud data using business intelligence software to enhance control health, coverage and effectiveness, and risk visibility and response.

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) can help organizations achieve this by providing comprehensive security controls across cloud-native environments. CNAPP solutions integrate asset discovery, real-time monitoring, and compliance enforcement into a single platform, allowing security teams to visualize workload behavior, detect misconfigurations, and enforce least-privilege access policies dynamically. By leveraging CNAPPs, organizations can continuously track and protect their cloud assets without relying on outdated inventory snapshots. Integrate data from CNAPP solutions into your centralized business intelligence dashboard for a holistic view.

 

5. Continuous Monitoring & Threat Detection

Security teams must adopt a proactive stance through real-time monitoring and anomaly detection.

  • Deploy cloud-native security tools (e.g., Tenable Cloud Security, WIZ, Qualys Total Cloud, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, AWS Security Hub, Google Security Command Center). Some of these fall into the CNAPP category, and some do not.
  • Integrate the data from the cloud-native and/or CNAPP tools with legacy tools using Business Intelligence.
  • Monitor privileged account activity for signs of compromise.
  • Use machine learning-based anomaly detection to identify deviations from baseline behavior.
  • Leverage historical workload execution data to identify outliers and threats.

6. Logging, Baseline Creation, and Deviation Reporting

Cloud security is data driven. Effective logging and baseline comparisons allow organizations to detect and respond to threats faster.

  • Centralize logs using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and/or XSOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response solutions.
  • Establish behavioral baselines for network traffic, identity usage, and system configurations.
  • Automate alerts for deviation reporting, ensuring rapid investigation and response.
  • Utilize real-time analytics to correlate workload behavior with security events.

 

Actionable Steps for CISOs

  1. Identify Existing Risk: Inventory of Solutions, Services, and Providers
  2. Understand and Validate Roles and Responsibilities
  3. Align Risk Priorities
  4. Map Assets and Dependencies: Using a CNAPP or other data aggregation methods, create a live digital inventory of workloads, APIs, and dependencies to establish a security baseline.
  5. Enhance Identity and Access Controls: Implement zero-trust principles and enforce strict authentication policies.
  6. Monitor & Log Everything: Capture all events, monitor for anomalies, and integrate with threat intelligence feeds.
  7. Develop a Risk Response Plan: Define cloud-specific incident detection, response, and recovery strategies.
  8. Adopt a Risk-Based Compliance-First Approach: Align security measures with regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, and NIST, ensuring that compliance (with internal policy and/or external regulation) serves as a foundation for security rather than an afterthought. Rather than treating compliance as a static requirement, organizations should use these frameworks as a baseline to continuously strengthen security operations.
  9. Phone a Friend like HALOCK Security Labs to Assist

 

Conclusion

A risk-based approach to cloud security—anchored in asset management, operational visibility, zero-trust, and continuous monitoring—empowers organizations to stay ahead of evolving threats. If an organization can demonstrate that the same technical, procedural, or policy control is consistently executed across all environments, it will successfully manage its overall risk. CISOs and CIOs must ensure that their organization has implemented and is actively managing the controls for which they are responsible with each vendor and environment. Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a key example of this challenge. By ensuring that identity, access, and workload management follow the same rigorous controls in all environments, organizations can maintain visibility and control while reducing exposure. Applying consistent security principles across cloud and on-premises environments will allow organizations to maintain control while enabling business innovation.

Learn about HALOCK’s CLOUD SECURITY ASSESSMENT SERVICE

ABOUT HALOCK SECURITY LABS

HALOCK is a risk management and information security consulting firm providing cybersecurity, regulatory, strategic, and litigation services. HALOCK has pioneered an approach to risk analysis that aligns with regulatory standards for “reasonable” and “appropriate” safeguards and risk, using due care and reasonable person principles. As the principal authors of CIS Risk Assessment Method (RAM) and board members of The Duty of Care Risk Analysis (DoCRA) Council, HALOCK offers unique insight to help organizations define their acceptable level of risk and establish reasonable security.

 

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[1] 40+ Alarming Cloud Security Statistics for 2025

[2] 130+ Data Breach Statistics 2025 – The Complete Look

[3] NEW RESEARCH: Multi-Cloud Security Is “A Problem”

[4] 50+ Cloud Security Statistics in 2024