Cloud Security Guides

Securing Kubernetes requires a defence-in-depth approach across the control plane, workload configuration, and runtime environment. The most impactful controls are RBAC hardening, network policy enforcement, pod security standards, proper secrets management, and continuous image scanning — the same domains tested in the CKS exam and exploited most frequently in real-world incidents. This guide covers each layer with practical guidance for teams running managed clusters on EKS, GKE, or AKS. RBAC: Least Privilege at the API Layer Role-Based Access Control is the primary authorisation mechanism in Kubernetes, and misconfigured RBAC remains one of the most common paths to cluster compromise. The default service account token mounted into every pod, combined with overly permissive ClusterRoleBindings, gives attackers a trivial lateral movement vector. ...

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a category of security tooling designed to discover, analyse, and govern the permissions granted to identities across cloud environments. It addresses a fundamental challenge of cloud-scale operations: the near-impossibility of manually tracking who — or what — can do what across thousands of roles, policies, and resources. CIEM helps organisations enforce least privilege systematically, reducing the blast radius of compromised credentials and insider threats. ...

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is a security discipline focused on continuously discovering, classifying, and monitoring sensitive data across cloud environments to identify and remediate exposure risks. Unlike perimeter-focused controls, DSPM keeps the data itself at the centre of your security strategy — understanding where it lives, who can access it, and whether those access patterns are appropriate. As organisations spread data across multi-cloud storage, SaaS platforms, and data pipelines, DSPM has become an essential capability for maintaining a defensible security posture. ...

Securing AI agents with persistent access to production cloud infrastructure requires a fundamentally different threat model from traditional IAM hardening. Unlike human operators, agentic AI systems can act at machine speed, chain tool calls autonomously, and be manipulated through their input data — making conventional perimeter and identity controls insufficient on their own. Architects must layer prompt-level guardrails, strict least privilege boundaries, and runtime monitoring to safely deploy agentic workloads. ...

AWS IAM is the control plane for everything you do in AWS — misconfigured policies and poorly scoped permissions are consistently the root cause of serious cloud breaches. Securing IAM correctly means enforcing least privilege at every layer, eliminating long-lived credentials where possible, and building preventive controls that survive organisational change. The practices below are applicable at any scale, from a single-account startup to a multi-account enterprise estate. Least Privilege: More Than a Slogan Most engineers understand the principle; fewer apply it rigorously. Least privilege in AWS IAM means granting only the permissions required for a specific task, scoped to the narrowest possible set of resources, for the shortest necessary duration. ...

Zero Trust is a security model built on the principle of “never trust, always verify” — every user, device, and connection must be authenticated and authorised before accessing any resource, regardless of whether the request originates inside or outside the corporate network. It replaces the outdated assumption that anything behind the firewall is inherently trustworthy. In cloud environments particularly, Zero Trust has become the foundational approach to modern network security. ...

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a category of security tooling that continuously monitors cloud environments for misconfigurations, policy violations, and compliance drift. CSPM tools provide automated assessment and remediation of security risks across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments. In an era where the shared responsibility model places configuration squarely in the customer’s hands, CSPM has become foundational infrastructure for any serious cloud security programme. Why Misconfiguration Is the Primary Threat Vector The cloud doesn’t get breached the way data centres traditionally did. Sophisticated zero-days and nation-state exploits make headlines, but the overwhelming majority of cloud security incidents trace back to something far more mundane: a storage bucket left publicly accessible, an overly permissive IAM policy, a security group open to 0.0.0.0/0, or logging quietly disabled on a critical service. ...

The shared responsibility model is a framework that defines the division of security obligations between a cloud provider and its customers. The provider secures the underlying infrastructure — physical hardware, network fabric, and hypervisor layers — whilst the customer remains responsible for everything they build and configure on top of it. Misunderstanding this boundary is one of the most common root causes of cloud security incidents. How the Model Works Across AWS, Azure, and GCP All three major providers publish explicit statements of their shared responsibility model, but the precise language and boundaries differ enough to cause confusion when operating across multiple clouds. ...

Security architects working across more than one cloud constantly hit the same problem: each provider names equivalent capabilities completely differently, and the equivalences are rarely exact. AWS Security Hub, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Google Security Command Center occupy roughly the same space, but they differ in scope, pricing model and how much they overlap with neighbouring services. This guide maps the security services of all three major providers — AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud (GCP) — organised by security domain. Each section gives a comparison table followed by a technical breakdown of what the services actually do and, crucially, where the mappings are loose rather than one-to-one. ...