Cloud Security Best Practices

Start with the Shared Responsibility Model

Cloud providers secure the underlying infrastructure; you secure identities, data, and configurations. Map responsibilities per service, document assumptions, and revisit as architectures change. How do you explain this model to new stakeholders?

Assign data owners, system custodians, and control operators. Use a simple RACI so nobody assumes someone else handled encryption, backups, or monitoring. Comment with what ownership model works in your organization.

One team avoided an incident when a game-day uncovered an unowned storage bucket. They formalized ownership, added tags, and built alerts. Share your own near-miss moments and what they changed for you.

Identity and Access: Least Privilege Everywhere

Design for least privilege and just-in-time

Scope roles to tasks, not teams. Use time-bound elevation for rare operations and remove standing admin access. Review permissions quarterly. What’s your biggest win reducing excessive privileges without slowing delivery?

Strengthen authentication with phishing-resistant MFA

Adopt hardware security keys or passkeys for admins and automation. Enforce conditional access and device trust. Eliminate legacy protocols. Subscribe for our step-by-step rollout checklist that balances usability with hardened authentication.

Rotate, audit, and eliminate long-lived secrets

Prefer workload identities over static keys. Store secrets in a managed vault, automate rotation, and alert on unused credentials. We once found a dormant key powering a critical job—have you found similar surprises?

Protect Data: Encrypt, Minimize, and Govern

Encrypt in transit and at rest by default

Enable service-level encryption, enforce TLS, and require private endpoints where possible. Validate configurations with policy-as-code and continuous checks. Which encryption misconfiguration have you seen most often in reviews?

Manage keys with discipline

Centralize key management, separate roles for key admins and data users, and rotate regularly. Use customer-managed keys where needed and monitor key usage patterns. Comment if you prefer provider or customer-managed keys—and why.

Classify and minimize sensitive data

Label data by sensitivity, restrict replication, and set lifecycle rules to delete what you no longer need. Fewer copies, fewer crises. Share your favorite discovery tool for finding unexpected sensitive data.

Network Security: Segmentation and Zero Trust

Segment workloads and restrict lateral movement

Use dedicated virtual networks, subnets, and security groups to isolate tiers. Block unnecessary east-west traffic and validate boundaries with automated tests. How granular do you go when segmenting microservices?

Secure service-to-service communications

Adopt mutual TLS, short-lived certificates, and identity-aware proxies. Prefer private service endpoints over public exposure. Tell us how you introduced service identities without disrupting existing traffic.

Control ingress and egress with precision

Protect edges with WAFs and DDoS services, set egress allow-lists, and log all gateway flows. Catch data exfiltration early. Subscribe for our egress policy template you can adapt in minutes.

Visibility and Detection: See What Matters

Centralize logs and keep them tamper-evident

Aggregate audit, access, and network logs into a dedicated account with immutable storage and tight access controls. What retention period balances compliance, cost, and investigative needs for you?

Automate real-time detection and response

Feed logs to your SIEM, enable managed threat detections, and trigger playbooks for high-severity events. Auto-remediate misconfigurations fast. Comment with your top alert that actually prevented an incident.

Test detections with game days

Run purple-team exercises to simulate token theft, suspicious API calls, or anomalous data access. Validate alerts and tuning. Want our game-day scenarios checklist? Subscribe and we’ll send it straight to you.

Infrastructure as code with policy controls

Version everything, scan templates against benchmarks, and block risky changes in CI. Provide curated modules with secure defaults. Share your favorite policy-as-code rule that caught a subtle misconfiguration.

Harden baselines and drift continuously

Adopt CIS-aligned baselines, enforce tags, and monitor configuration drift. Remediate automatically where safe. What’s your approach for balancing auto-fix with change management approvals in production?

Educate and empower builders

Offer short guardrail docs, office hours, and security champions in each team. Celebrate secure designs in demos. Tell us how you reward developers when they prevent risks before they reach production.

Preparedness: Incident Response and Recovery

Define severity levels, escalation paths, evidence handling, and communication templates. Store runbooks where responders can find them instantly. How often do you rehearse your incident roles under time pressure?

Preparedness: Incident Response and Recovery

Create immutable, cross-account backups and test restores regularly. Validate recovery time and recovery point objectives. Share a lesson you learned when a restore took longer than expected.

Preparedness: Incident Response and Recovery

Hold blameless post-incident reviews, capture actionable improvements, and track completion. Convert fixes into guardrails. Subscribe to get our post-incident template used by high-performing teams.

Preparedness: Incident Response and Recovery

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