With the pace of business today, cloud adoption is a key ingredient to accelerating how businesses scale, ship products faster, and reach the market first.
But with that speed comes tradeoff: expanded attack surfaces.
This adoption of cloud infrastructure has fundamentally changed how we approach security. Unlike traditional on-prem environments, where perimeters are more defined, the “infinite perimeter” of the cloud means your resources can (theoretically) be accessed from anywhere.
Cloud providers operate under a shared responsibility model, which helps, but it doesn’t absolve customers of their part. At the end of the day, you’re still responsible for workloads, configurations, identity, and data.
That’s why the demand for Security Engineers with cloud expertise continues to grow. If you’re looking to pivot into this in-demand field, here’s how I’d start building a strong foundation.
Cloud-Agnostic Security Concepts
Each cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) has its quirks, but the fundamentals remain consistent.
If you double down on the basics, you’ll be able to pivot into any provider quickly and adapt to whatever stack your company uses.
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
At its core, cloud security is really about identity.
That’s because identity has become the new perimeter. Attackers no longer need to brute force Firewalls and probe networks. If they can just hijack valid credentials, they can walk straight into your environment.
IAM has a few fundamental building blocks:
Users represent individual entities, like human users or service accounts.
Roles are sets of permissions that can be assumed by users, apps, or services.
Groups are logical collections of users that inherit policies.
Policies are JSON-like permission sets that define what actions are allowed or denied.
There are a few best practices when it comes to IAM:
Avoid raw user accounts for day-to-day use and instead opt to federate users through SSO and enforce role-based access with Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning.
Use groups to scale policy management across your user base.
Leverage the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) to design policies so users and services only get the access they need and nothing more.
Overly broad roles and misconfigured policies are some of the most common (and costly) pitfalls in cloud security. Tight IAM controls are often the difference between a minor incident and a full blown breach.
Networking & Segmentation
At a high level, cloud networking looks a lot like on-prem, just with some new terminology.
VPCs (Virtual Private Clouds) are essentially the cloud equivalent of a datacenter network. They cut out a private slice of the provider’s global infrastructure, letting you define your own IP ranges, routing rules, and connectivity. Misconfigurations here are one of the fastest ways to unintentionally expose workloads to the internet.
Subnets work in much the same way as on-prem and are commonly split into public and private zones to control exposure.
Security Groups (SGs) and Network ACLs (NACLs) act as your main filters. SGs are instance-level, stateful firewalls that handle both inbound and outbound rules. While NACLs are subnet-level, stateless filters with explicit allow/deny logic.
The key here is microsegmentation. You can shrink your attack surface and minimize blast radius in the event of an incident just by applying fine-grained controls between your workloads.
Data Protection
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: Encryption in Transit and At Rest in the Cloud.
Fortunately, most cloud providers make this straightforward. TLS is easy to enforce across internal APIs and external endpoints, and storage systems often encrypt at rest by default.
You’ll also have to get comfortable with a couple critical services:
Key Management Systems (KMS) are provider-managed services that handle key creation, rotation, and usage. You can define fine-grained access controls around who or what can use specific keys.
Secrets Managers centralize sensitive values, enforce rotation policies, and give you visibility into who access what, when - for those pesky audits.
Used together, KMS and Secrets Managers provide a solid foundation for a data protection strategy in the cloud.
Monitoring and Logging
Visibility is non-negotiable in the cloud.
Cloud providers offer services that collect complete audit trails of who did what, where, and when. These logs are invaluable for forensics, so you’ll want to get them ingested into your SIEM ASAP in order to correlate, investigate, and get real-time alerting.
These providers also have their own flavors of anomaly and threat detection services that leverage machine learning and threat intelligence to surface anomalies. While they can’t replace custom detection, they’re a welcome compliment.
You’ll still need to put on your detection engineer hat to fight off alert fatigue, so if you’re already ingesting your cloud log sources into your SIEM - I’d suggest checking out my Detection Engineering Starter Guide.
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Key Threats in the Cloud
To be an effective Cloud Security Engineer, you’ll need to get good at identifying potential indicators of misconfiguration (IOMs) and potential attack paths.
While finding advanced threats takes some experience, generally the most impact comes from nailing the fundamentals.
Here are some of the top threats you can start addressing from day one.
Misconfigurations
Misconfigurations are a primary cause of cloud breaches, and unfortunately - they’re everywhere. Even with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) reducing risk, mistakes still slip through.
Some classic examples include:
Open storage buckets are the byproduct of misunderstood defaults and rushed settings. Suddenly, your bucket is wide open to the internet. Attackers passively scan for these and what can leak out usually isn’t good: PII, credentials, or even proprietary source code.
Overly permissive IAM roles occur when convenience takes precedence and caution is thrown to the wayside. It’s not uncommon to see blanket administrator roles attached to roles that have no business having those permissions. Ignoring the Principle of Least Privilege doesn’t just expand your attack surface, it creates a fleet of unnecessary high-privilege accounts waiting to be abused.
Even in IaC-driven environments, manual console tweaks can lead to Infrastructure drift. Those one-off changes create inconsistencies, complicate audits, and leave a hidden layer to your attack surface that will soon be forgotten.
Misconfigurations are easy to make, and just as easy for attackers to find. Your job is to spot them early, correct them quickly, and to foster a culture that puts Infrastructure as Code first.
Credential Theft & Privilege Escalation
Cloud credentials make the mouths of attackers water.
And even though credentials are known to be sensitive, it’s surprisingly common for developers to accidentally commit access keys into repositories.
If those repos are public, you’ve just gifted everyone the keys to the kingdom.
Even in private repos, once credentials are exposed, they can be chained with misconfigurations or overly permissive roles to move laterally and escalate privileges. And just like that, what may seem like a small leak can escalate to a full environmental compromise.
Even with a strong logging and monitoring strategy, credential misuse is notoriously hard to detect because it just looks like legitimate access at that point.
Supply Chain Risks
Just like any project, your cloud environment runs on top of countless dependencies, packages, images, and pipelines.
And each has risks associated:
Dependency poisoning can occur from a typosquatted malicious package, or even a legitimate library that quietly accepted a malicious pull request. Installing the wrong code can cause instant RCE, credential theft, or potentially even worse.
Insecure base images can often contain outdated libraries and known vulnerabilities that devs may not notice until too late. Pulling “latest” without validation is a recipe for trouble. Make sure to pin to a stable version.
CI/CD pipeline compromise can effectively allow an attacker to inherit trusted, privileged access to your cloud environment. Your pipeline is a crown jewel - protect the secrets, signing keys, and deployment credentials that it holds.
If you don’t know and control what’s running in your environment, someone else will figure out a way to!
Essential Cloud Skills for Security Engineers
Understanding threats is only half the job.
The other half is building the skills to mitigate them. Cloud environments demand a mindset that balances speed, scale, and security without slowing down the business.
Here are the core skills I’d focus on to level up as a Cloud Security Engineer.
Strong IAM Knowledge
It’s one thing to understand IAM concepts, and another to actually enforce PoLP at scale.
That means:
Granting only the minimum necessary permissions for roles.
Using groups and policies to manage users efficiently.
Striking a balance between strong security and developer productivity.
On the operation side, partner with IT to federate your cloud environment into SSO or enforce MFA everywhere, and apply a logging strategy.
And of course - ban use of the root account unless in the case of emergencies. Monitor it closely, and make sure no one uses it for day-to-day operations.
Zero Trust Networking
The old mindset of “inside equals safe” doesn’t cut it in the cloud.
A Zero Trust approach means every request must be authenticated and authorized, even if it originates from inside your VPC.
In practice, this means building systems around continuous verification and treating internal traffic with the same scrutiny as external.
By leaving implicit trust at the door, you reduce the blast radius of compromise and force attackers to work harder for every step they try to take.
Container & Kubernetes Basics
You’ll want a solid grasp of containerization concepts effectively with DevOps and Infrastructure teams while also spotting potential security gaps.
At minimum, you should be familiar with:
Namespaces: Logical isolation of workloads
Registry: Servers that store and distribute container images
RBAC: Role Based Access Control for fine-grained permissions
Pod Security Policies/Pod Security Admission: Controls that prevent risky or insecure configurations
From a security perspective, focus on protecting registries and images.
Use private registries with enforced access controls, regularly scan images for CVEs, implement signed images to prevent tampering, and avoid the “latest” tag by pinning to immutable versions.
These measures reduce risk and increase confidence in what’s running in production.
IaC & Drift Management
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is now a standard practice.
And while you don’t necessarily need to write production-ready templates, you should be able to read and understand them.
IaC enabled repeatability, version control, and peer review - which in turn makes infrastructure predictable and secure.
Although each tool has its own syntax and providers, the declarative approach is consistent.
As a security engineer, your role is to:
Integrate security checks directly into the development workflow.
Help teams identify misconfigurations early.
Address infrastructure drift.
Unmanaged drift creates “invisible” infrastructure - your attacker's ideal target. Staying on top of drift ensures you’re defending the actual state of your environment, not just the state defined in code.
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Cloud-Native
Cloud is the new baseline, and it’s becoming a requirement to have this kind of knowledge in the various security engineering disciplines.
Security engineers today are expected to protect this dynamic and distributed cloud infrastructure.
That shift means rethinking familiar concepts in new contexts:
Running IR in the cloud.
Leveraging cloud-native threat intelligence.
Working with developers to embed security early in their pipeline.
The work is different, but principles remain.
The key is continuous learning and adaptability. Build your foundation cloud-agnostically, then map them to the services and platforms your organization uses.
This approach keeps your skills portable, scalable, and resilient as the cloud continues to evolve - making you cloud-native.
Securely Yours,
Ryan G. Cox
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