Cloud Security Guides

Cloud Security Vulnerability Management: a practitioner’s guide for AWS environments Cloud security vulnerability management is a continuous operational discipline, not a periodic hygiene exercise. Cloud infrastructure changes constantly as teams deploy new workloads, APIs, and services across multi-account and hybrid environments, and each change can introduce vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or exposed attack paths that attackers can reach within minutes. For UK financial services firms under FCA oversight, or any organisation handling personal data under UK GDPR, the stakes are higher still: a single unmitigated CVE in a production workload is not just a technical failing, it is a potential regulatory event. ...

Post-Quantum Cryptography and AWS migration: a practitioner’s guide Post-quantum cryptography migration is no longer a theoretical exercise reserved for government cryptographers and academic papers. It is an active engineering programme with real deadlines, live AWS service releases, and regulatory consequences for UK financial services and critical national infrastructure. If you run workloads on AWS that involve long-lived sensitive data, digital signatures, or PKI, this guide is for you. I will walk through the standards landscape, what AWS has already shipped, where your responsibilities lie under the shared responsibility model, and the practical steps needed to avoid being caught flat-footed when the 2028 NCSC checkpoint arrives. ...

HIPAA compliance on AWS: what every cloud security architect actually needs to know If you are building or auditing healthcare workloads on AWS in 2026, HIPAA compliance is a live architectural constraint with real enforcement teeth. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at HHS continues to pursue breach investigations, hacking and IT incidents are now the dominant cause of breached health records on the OCR portal, and a major proposed overhaul of the HIPAA Security Rule is working its way through the federal rulemaking process. Sorting out your HIPAA posture on AWS is urgent regardless of where that rulemaking lands. This guide covers the foundation: what the Business Associate Addendum (BAA) actually gives you, how to structure HIPAA-eligible service usage, the technical controls you must configure yourself, and the common mistakes that turn a compliant architecture on paper into a reportable breach in practice. ...

Recent cloud security CVEs: July 2026 threat briefing for cloud architects If you manage cloud workloads and your vulnerability management process still runs on a monthly review cycle, this month is a fairly blunt argument for changing that. The CVEs disclosed across June and July 2026 cover container breakout in Azure Kubernetes Service, a 29-year-old memory leak in Squid Proxy, a pre-authentication remote code execution in WordPress core, and a record-breaking Microsoft Patch Tuesday that touched cloud services directly. Every one of these has implications for how you architect, detect, and respond, not just how quickly you click “update.” ...

Privileged Access Management in AWS: a practitioner’s guide Privileged access management in AWS is not an optional bolt-on. It is the difference between a controlled, auditable estate and one that is a single leaked credential away from serious trouble. Attackers target high-level access first because it is the most direct path to everything that matters. For UK financial services organisations under FCA oversight, or public sector bodies procuring via G-Cloud, this is not academic. It is a regulatory obligation. The NCSC’s cloud security principles explicitly address secure service administration, and your PAM posture will be scrutinised in any serious assurance engagement. ...

AWS Inspector vulnerability management: the definitive practitioner’s guide If your organisation is running workloads on AWS in 2025 and not actively managing vulnerabilities through Inspector, you are almost certainly carrying unquantified risk into production. The NCSC has warned organisations to prepare for a “patch wave” as exploitation timelines compress and AI tooling lowers the barrier for attackers. Against that backdrop, continuous automated vulnerability scanning is not optional for any organisation subject to FCA operational resilience requirements or NCSC CAF obligations. ...

If you run internet-facing workloads on AWS, getting your WAF configuration right is no longer optional. It is table stakes for FCA-regulated services, GDPR compliance, and the NCSC’s Cyber Essentials Plus framework. What has changed in 2026 is the scope of what WAF now needs to protect: not just your ALBs and CloudFront distributions, but agentic AI workloads running on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway, and APIs that attract a growing volume of automated traffic. Two disclosures in the last 72 hours make this more pressing than usual. One is a major capability release, the other a critical vulnerability bulletin. Both require your attention now. ...

Compliance in cloud environments is widely misunderstood and frequently mishandled. The misunderstanding takes two forms: organisations that treat cloud compliance as a mapping exercise — draw lines between framework controls and AWS services, tick boxes, file the report — and organisations that treat cloud as a compliance risk and avoid it entirely. Both miss the point. Cloud platforms, when correctly configured, can make compliance significantly more achievable than traditional data centre environments. But “correctly configured” is doing enormous work in that sentence. ...

AWS Security Hub is the centralised security posture management service within AWS, functioning as both a findings aggregator and a compliance evaluation engine across your entire AWS organisation. Findings from native services — GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, IAM Access Analyzer, and AWS Config — are ingested alongside findings from over 60 third-party security products, all normalised into the Amazon Security Finding Format (ASFF). Security Hub continuously evaluates account configuration against security standards including the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices (FSBP), CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, and PCI DSS, generating PASS or FAIL findings for each evaluated resource across every member account. ...

AI systems running in cloud environments introduce a threat model that most security teams are not yet equipped to handle. The underlying risk is not that AI is inherently dangerous — it is that AI components are being wired into cloud infrastructure with the same access patterns as any other service, without the same scrutiny applied to the novel attack surfaces they introduce. An LLM with access to a database, a file system, or a set of API credentials is a new kind of principal with new kinds of attack vectors. Security architects who understand cloud IAM, network controls, and vulnerability management need to extend that understanding to cover AI-specific threats before organisations learn about them the hard way. ...