By: Anton Abaya
The cloud has become the backbone of modern business. It powers everything from collaboration tools to customer data platforms, fueling agility, scalability, and innovation. But for all its benefits, the cloud also comes with blind spots. Unlike on-premises environments, risks in the cloud aren’t always visible–because they are abstracted to the tenant, and rarely live in one obvious place.
Security teams are finding that the most serious threats often hide in plain sight, buried in misconfigurations, overlooked governance gaps, or misunderstood and constantly changing shared-responsibility boundaries. Left unchecked, these vulnerabilities can open the door to costly breaches, regulatory penalties, and long-term trust issues with customers.
To keep pace, organizations need a sharper lens on where risks originate and how they evolve. Below, I discuss the importance of cloud security assessments, and then break down the five most common places hidden risk tends to live in the cloud, explaining why addressing these risks early is a must for long-term resilience.
As a GRC practitioner, PCI QSA, IT Auditor, and also a Red Teamer for over two decades, it became crystal clear that a specialized Cloud Security Assessment methodology was desperately needed.
What Is a Cloud Security Assessment?
A cloud security assessment (CSA) is a comprehensive process that uncovers vulnerabilities in an organization’s cloud environment–or the cloud control plane. It evaluates everything from architecture and configurations to weaknesses in identity controls, data flows, and monitoring practices.
CSAs are meant to do more than just uncover weaknesses. They provide your teams with a clear picture of how cloud risk maps to real business impact, whether that’s financial exposure, operational disruption, or reputational harm. It also measures the organization’s overall maturity in Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) posture in the Cloud, a trending inquiry now being asked at the Board-level.
Simply put, a well-conducted cloud security assessment is firmly grounded on blending multiple cybersecurity disciplines, spanning GRC, Cloud Security, Penetration Testing, and Audit methodologies- all-in-one.
Why (and How Often to) Conduct Cloud Security Assessments?
Cloud threats evolve too quickly for one-time checks. Enterprises should perform cloud security assessments at least annually, or more frequently when adopting new platforms, handling sensitive data, or undergoing major cloud migrations.
My colleague at Pellera Technologies, Josh Berry, Senior Director of Penetration Testing, emphasizes the importance of coupling automation with expert analysis: “Tools can flag misconfigurations, but without human expertise, the real risk context is missed. That’s why assessments that blend both are the ones that actually drive down exposure. Further, when a penetration test successfully exploits a vulnerability in the cloud, that’s usually just the tip-of-the iceberg, which is where the CSA comes in.”
A large retail organization processing over a trillion credit card transactions annually had allowed its Marketing team to stand up shadow IT in the cloud—outside the visibility of its cyber teams. The resulting environment was already in production, with millions of records of sensitive PII in play and serious compliance risks.
Pellera was engaged to perform a Cloud Security Assessment. We began by understanding the business drivers and use cases, followed by a structured threat modeling exercise and a technical deep dive into configurations across IaaS, PaaS, FaaS, and SaaS layers. This comprehensive review uncovered numerous critical findings, including issues with data protection, access controls, and governance.
The final report not only mapped findings to compliance obligations but also revealed a systemic lack of cloud security governance. Executive leadership gained an unfiltered view of the risks, enabling them to dismantle organizational silos and drive alignment between business and security teams. The organization avoided a potential large-scale breach and established a foundation for sustainable cloud security governance moving forward.
>> Related Read: Why Compliance Is Starting to Require Continuous Penetration Testing
Top 5 Places Where Hidden Risk Lives in the Cloud
While the cloud promises scalability and speed, it also hides risks in places that security teams can easily overlook. Missteps in set up, monitoring, and oversight often leave blind spots that attackers know how to exploit.
Below are the five areas most likely to conceal vulnerabilities that demand attention.
1. Cloud Settings and Configurations
Misconfigured settings remain the leading cause of cloud breaches. From overly permissive storage buckets to unmonitored API endpoints, configuration drift can expose critical systems.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a common weak spot–from incomplete MFA deployment to dormant accounts. Excessive privileges or unused accounts become easy footholds for attackers. In other words, you can do all the compliance work you want, but what the Pellera team and I see in breach reports is that failures often start with something as simple as identity management process lifecycles not being governed correctly.
2. AI and Automation
Adoption of AI, or cloud-based AI, is rapidly expanding cloud environments across all organizations, and with that introduces new challenges. Models can ingest sensitive data in ways that expand the attack surface, and automated decision-making can amplify misconfigurations if not properly governed. The speed and scale that make AI powerful also make mistakes harder to catch and remediate without strong oversight.
To manage this, companies need clear policies for how AI interacts with data, along with continuous monitoring to ensure that automated actions align with compliance and security requirements. Ultimately, you want to embed controls (e.g., NIST AI Risk Management Framework) that allow AI to both accelerate operations and minimize your risk.
3. Data Lakes
Speaking of risk, cloud data lakes or platforms promise agility by centralizing vast amounts of information, but they also concentrate risk as well. A single misconfigured storage account network exposed to the internet, with poorly governed access control, or even via a leaked API key, can expose millions of sensitive records, creating a high-value ransomware target for attackers. As these repositories grow, the complexity of monitoring who has access (and why) can quickly spiral out of control. While Snowflake-related breaches have skyrocketed in the last year, tomorrow it will be another cloud service instead.
Organizations should treat all data lakes and data platforms, wherever Cloud Service Provider it may be hosted, as living ecosystems that require constant hygiene—with a shared responsibility matrix. This means auditing permissions, encrypting sensitive datasets, and segmenting storage so that exposure in one area doesn’t cascade across the environment. The balance lies in making data widely available for internal users and analytics, while ensuring it never becomes an unmitigated liability.
4. Cardholder Data Flows
For enterprises that process payments, cardholder data flows represent one of the most sensitive areas. Mapping and securing these flows is notoriously difficult in large, distributed organizations, and exponentially challenging in modern networking technologies that we see in the Cloud.
In my experience helping many post-data breach clients, they happen because organizations don’t fully understand where their payment data is stored, or they otherwise did not have sufficient controls to prevent it from being replicated to other cloud storage locations. It’s the proverbial saying: You can’t protect what you don’t know.
5. Cloud E-commerce Threats: Content Management Systems, Web Analytics Trackers, Third-party Cloud Integrations
Many e-commerce sites are managed by Content Management Systems (CMS) that are able to inject code to the e-commerce website, which are often controlled and managed by Marketing teams. Marketing teams are also notorious for adding new website analytics trackers at the top-level, thereby tracking every mouse click and keyboard keystroke. As a pentester, I have intentionally targeted Marketing for credential theft, gaining full access to the CMS, and from there injecting keystroke loggers on sensitive forms. Similarly, as a PCI QSA, I have also witnessed website analytics trackers (inserted by the Marketing department) streaming usernames, passwords, SSNs, and payment card data to the third-party web analytics tracking service–with just a single line of code.
With many e-commerce sites being rapidly migrated to the cloud, continuous monitoring and integration of new cloud-based third-party integrations, such as cloud-based CMS and web analytics trackers, are critical to reducing this risk.
Dominating the news cycle lately is yet another cloud-based PaaS solution giant: Salesforce. Used by many, it is yet another cloud-based service attack vector that has led to dozens of data breach announcements from many Fortune 100 companies.
Cloud Security Assessment Services That Reduce Hidden Risk
Cloud risks aren’t new, but they’ve evolved alongside the tools we all depend on. The organizations that will thrive are those that treat the cloud as a shared responsibility, with governance and security built in from the start—but that is often the exception.
At Pellera, we’ve seen that no two cloud journeys are the same, which means no two risk landscapes are identical. Powered by Pellera’s Assess, Identify, Mitigate (AIM) methodology, we’ve helped enterprises gain:
- A clear map of their cloud environment and data flows
- Prioritized remediation guidance tied to real business impact
- Confidence that cloud governance, compliance, and security controls are optimized for both today’s and tomorrow’s threats
If you’re rethinking how to bring visibility and control to your environment, let’s have a conversation. We’d welcome the chance to share lessons learned and explore where stronger guardrails could make the most impact for your business.
