Moving to the cloud does not mean your provider handles all security. Understanding where their responsibility ends and yours begins is essential to preventing data breaches, misconfigurations, and compliance failures.
Blogs / Understanding Cloud Security: The Shared Responsibility Model
Cloud adoption continues to accelerate, but security incidents caused by misconfiguration remain the leading cause of cloud breaches. The shared responsibility model defines who secures what, yet many organisations struggle to understand where the cloud provider's obligations end and their own begin. This knowledge gap leads to exposed storage buckets, overly permissive access policies, and unmonitored environments that attackers actively target.
Many organisations assume that migrating to AWS, Azure, or GCP means the provider handles security entirely. In reality, cloud providers secure the infrastructure — physical data centres, hypervisors, and network fabric. Everything above that — IAM policies, storage bucket permissions, network security groups, encryption settings, and application-level controls — is the customer's responsibility. This distinction is critical, and misunderstanding it is one of the most common reasons cloud environments are compromised.
• Identity and access management — enforcing least privilege principles, enabling multi-factor authentication, and implementing role-based access controls across all cloud accounts.
• Storage security — configuring bucket policies correctly, enabling encryption at rest, and maintaining access logging to detect unauthorised data retrieval.
• Network configuration — designing VPCs with proper segmentation, restricting security groups and NACLs, and using private endpoints for sensitive services.
• Data protection — ensuring encryption in transit, implementing robust key management practices, and maintaining tested backup policies.
• Monitoring and logging — enabling CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, or GCP Cloud Audit Logs to maintain visibility into all actions performed within your cloud environment.
During cloud security audits, we regularly find critical misconfigurations that expose organisations to significant risk. These include publicly accessible S3 buckets containing sensitive data, overly permissive IAM roles with wildcard permissions that violate least privilege, unencrypted RDS instances storing customer records, security groups allowing unrestricted inbound access on sensitive ports such as SSH and RDP, and disabled logging on critical services that eliminates forensic capability. Each of these findings represents a potential entry point or data exfiltration path that an attacker can exploit with minimal effort.
Conclusion: Security Is a Shared Partnership
Cloud security is a partnership between your provider and your team. A thorough cloud security audit that covers IAM, network configuration, data protection, and logging can reveal gaps before they become incidents. If your organisation has migrated to the cloud or is planning to, ensure you have a clear understanding of your security responsibilities.
Our cloud security team can conduct a comprehensive assessment of your AWS, Azure, or GCP environment, identifying misconfigurations, validating controls, and providing actionable remediation guidance to strengthen your cloud security posture.
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