Cloud Security Guides

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 architecture built on the principle of never trust, always verify. Every user, device, and connection must be explicitly authenticated and authorised before accessing any resource, regardless of whether the request originates inside or outside the corporate network. It replaces the assumption that network location confers trust — the premise at the heart of traditional perimeter security, and the assumption that credential theft, phishing, insider threats, and supply chain compromises systematically exploit. ...

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a category of cloud security tooling that continuously monitors cloud infrastructure for misconfigurations, policy violations, and compliance drift — and automatically surfaces or remediates them. CSPM platforms assess configuration state across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments against established security benchmarks including CIS Foundations, NIST 800-53, and provider-native standards such as the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices (FSBP). Findings are mapped to specific compliance controls, generating audit-ready evidence for frameworks including PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and SOC 2. Common misconfigurations CSPM detects include publicly accessible S3 buckets, overly permissive IAM roles, disabled CloudTrail logging, unencrypted databases, and security groups open to 0.0.0.0/0. ...

The shared responsibility model defines the division of security obligations between a cloud provider and its customers. The provider secures the underlying infrastructure — physical data centres, network fabric, and hypervisor — whilst the customer is responsible for everything built and configured on top of it. All three major providers use equivalent framing: AWS describes it as security of the cloud (provider) versus security in the cloud (customer); Azure and GCP draw the same distinction. ...

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. ...