We’ve conducted dozens of cloud security assessments over the past year, and a pattern keeps emerging: organizations invest in penetration testing for their cloud environments, but the scope almost always misses the areas where real breaches occur.
The Scope Problem
Traditional penetration tests were designed for on-premise networks — scan for open ports, exploit vulnerable services, pivot laterally. When applied to cloud environments, this approach translates to testing compute instances as if they were on-prem servers. The result? You get a report full of missing OS patches and exposed management ports, while the actual attack surface goes untested.
Where Breaches Actually Happen
The majority of cloud security incidents we investigate share common root causes:
- Overly permissive IAM roles. Service accounts and managed identities with admin-level permissions are the single most common finding in our assessments. Attackers who compromise any workload inherit those permissions.
- Misconfigured storage. Publicly accessible blob containers and S3 buckets continue to be a leading cause of data exposure, despite years of industry awareness.
- Secrets in code and configuration. API keys, connection strings, and service account credentials committed to repositories or stored in environment variables without proper secrets management.
- Missing network segmentation. Flat virtual networks where a compromised workload can reach every other resource in the subscription.
A Better Approach
An effective cloud security assessment should include:
- IAM review — Enumerate all identities, their permissions, and trust relationships. Map out privilege escalation paths.
- Configuration audit — Assess storage, networking, logging, and encryption settings against CIS benchmarks.
- Attack path analysis — Model realistic attack chains from initial access (compromised credentials, SSRF, exposed metadata endpoints) through to objectives (data exfiltration, resource hijacking).
- Detection validation — Verify that your SIEM and cloud-native detection tools actually alert on the techniques used during the assessment.
If your last cloud pentest report didn’t cover IAM, you tested the lock on the front door while leaving the windows open.