Across cloud security audits, the same handful of misconfigurations show up again and again — not because the platforms are insecure, but because secure configuration isn’t the default, and nobody’s specifically responsible for checking it as the environment grows.
Publicly exposed storage
S3 buckets and Azure Blob containers set to public, often temporarily for a one-off file share and never reverted, remain one of the most common findings in cloud audits industry-wide. We check for this explicitly on every engagement, since it’s both common and often trivial for an outside party to discover once found.
Over-privileged IAM roles
Roles and service accounts routinely accumulate far more permission than they need, usually because it was easier to grant broad access once than to scope it precisely and revisit later. An over-privileged role turns a single compromised credential into a much larger blast radius than it needed to be.
Default network security group rules left open
Management ports (SSH, RDP) left open to the entire internet instead of restricted to specific IP ranges or a VPN is a recurring finding, particularly on resources spun up quickly for a project and never revisited.
No centralized logging or alerting
Cloud platforms log extensively by default, but that data is only useful if something is actually watching it. We frequently find CloudTrail or Azure Activity Log enabled but with no alerting configured on the events that actually matter — which means a real intrusion could sit fully logged and completely unnoticed.
The pattern underneath all of these
None of this requires sophisticated tooling to fix — it requires someone auditing configuration on a recurring schedule rather than only at initial setup, since cloud environments drift as teams add resources over time. That’s the core of what our cloud security service actually does.