Cloud Security AssessmentsFind and Fix Cloud Vulnerabilities

Almost every cloud breach we investigate traces back to a configuration choice, not a zero-day exploit. Public S3 buckets. Security groups open to 0.0.0.0/0. Service accounts granted owner-level permissions by a contractor who left three years ago. Logging that was never wired into a SIEM. Encryption that was turned off to ship a prototype and never turned back on. None of this shows up in a vendor demo because the cloud provider ships defaults that are safer than most of what we find in production.

Our cloud security assessment is the methodical review that catches those choices. We look at every account, every service, every identity, every network boundary, and every data store you have in scope. We compare what we find to the CIS Benchmarks, the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix, and the compliance framework you need to pass. Then we hand you a written report that tells you exactly where you are exposed, how bad each finding is, and what to do about it.

We do this without touching production. Read-only credentials only. No write access, no agent installs on your workloads, no firewall changes. Your traffic and uptime are untouched. The worst thing we can do to your environment is look at it.

Cloud environments fail in specific, repeatable ways. These are the failure modes we expect to see on a first-pass assessment, and the ones we chase down most aggressively when we suspect they exist.

Exposed storage and data

Public buckets, containers, and blob stores remain the single most common source of embarrassing cloud leaks. We check object-level and bucket-level ACLs, disable-public-access settings at the account level, and any CDN or load balancer in front that may unintentionally expose private content. We also look for sensitive data written into public paths, typically by CI pipelines, log shippers, or a one-off export someone forgot about.

Identity sprawl and privilege creep

Human accounts that should have been deprovisioned. Service accounts with permissions that grew every time someone added a new capability. Third-party integrations granted more scope than they need. Role chains that let a low-privilege identity assume a high-privilege role through a trust path nobody remembers creating. We diagram these paths and show you which ones lead to account takeover.

Weak secret handling

Plaintext credentials in environment variables, in CloudFormation or Terraform state, in developer laptops, in CI logs, and in public Git history. We check for keys that should be rotated on a schedule, for any access key older than ninety days, and for any place where a secret could be printed to a log, persisted to disk, or shared across workloads that shouldn't share trust.

Blind spots in detection

CloudTrail missing in a region. Logs written to a bucket with no retention policy. Alerts firing to an unmonitored email address. GuardDuty or Defender findings ignored because nobody owns the queue. A SIEM wired to one account but not the others. Detection gaps are where breaches become incidents and incidents become reportable events.

Drift between policy and reality

You have a written policy that says encryption is enabled on every volume. Reality is that three EBS snapshots from a migration in 2022 aren't. You have a policy that says MFA is required. Reality is that a root account for one sub-account doesn't have it. Drift is silent until an auditor or an attacker finds it.

Cloud Security Posture Management is a three-part discipline: continuous measurement of configuration against known-good baselines, continuous review of identity and data exposure, and a remediation loop that actually closes findings instead of just reporting them. The tooling matters less than the loop.

For the assessment engagement we run industry-standard scanners and custom query sets against your environment to produce the snapshot. For clients who want ongoing coverage we help choose and tune a CSPM platform you will actually use, integrate it with your ticketing system, and define the runbooks that turn a new finding into a closed ticket in hours instead of weeks.

We do not sell a proprietary CSPM tool, and we do not earn referral fees on one. If the right answer for your environment is the native posture management built into AWS Security Hub, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, or Google Security Command Center, we will say so. If you need a multi-cloud platform that normalizes findings across all three, we will help you evaluate the options on their merits. The assessment is the vendor-neutral part; any long-term tooling recommendation is driven by what you are trying to measure and who is going to remediate it.

Every assessment produces the same deliverable set, tuned to your environment:

• Executive summary. Five pages, business language, top risks, remediation budget range, and a traffic-light snapshot of each compliance framework you care about.
• Technical findings report. Every finding with its severity, its exploitability, its mapped control, the evidence we collected, and the exact remediation steps or configuration change required.
• Risk-prioritized remediation roadmap. The order to fix findings in. What to do this week, this month, and this quarter. What to accept, what to transfer, and what to retire.
• Compliance evidence package. The control-by-control mapping your auditor expects, with the supporting screenshots and configuration exports.
• Debrief session. A ninety-minute live walkthrough with your technical team and a separate briefing for leadership if you want one.

You keep everything. The reports, the scans, the raw data. No lock-in, no subscription required to access findings after the engagement ends.

The hardest part of a security assessment isn't finding the problems; it's closing them. Most teams are capacity-constrained and live mostly in break-fix mode. Handing them a two-hundred-finding report with a ninety-day deadline rarely produces a better outcome than the problem you started with.

We work three ways on remediation, depending on what you need:

• Guidance only. Your team does all the work. We answer questions by email and Slack for ninety days after delivery at no additional cost.
• Co-remediation. We pair with your engineers on the hard findings, typically IAM restructuring, logging pipelines, and any multi-account governance work. You retain control; we bring the pattern library.
• Full remediation. Our team closes findings on a fixed or time-and-materials engagement. Each finding moves from open to validated-closed with an audit trail. This is the right choice when you have a compliance deadline and a small internal team.

Remediation integrates cleanly with our managed IT services if you want ongoing hardening, monitoring, and quarterly re-assessments baked into a single monthly engagement.

Most cloud security assessments sold today are in practice a sales motion for the assessor's preferred CSPM or SIEM product. The findings are real, but the recommendations are shaped by which product the assessing firm resells. You can usually tell because every report concludes with the same tool purchase, regardless of the environment.

We take a different posture. Our revenue is the assessment, the remediation, and the managed services that follow. We do not resell CSPM platforms, SIEM platforms, or cloud-native security products. When we recommend a tool we recommend it because it is the best fit for your environment, your team, and your budget, and we say so in writing. If a native control built into AWS, Azure, or GCP solves the problem, we use that and save you the line item. If a third-party platform is the right answer we help you evaluate it on its technical merits and its total cost of ownership.

Vendor neutrality is why our assessments get used as evidence for SOC 2, HIPAA, and CMMC audits: the auditor sees a report that reflects the environment, not a sales proposal.

Amazon Web Services

AWS assessments cover every in-scope account in your organization, including Organizations structure, Service Control Policies, IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO), IAM roles and users, S3 bucket policies and ACLs, VPC and security group design, CloudTrail and AWS Config coverage, GuardDuty posture, Security Hub findings, KMS key policies, Secrets Manager and Parameter Store usage, and Systems Manager agent coverage. We also review AWS-specific risks like Assumed-Role privilege escalation chains, over-permissive Lambda execution roles, S3 Block Public Access gaps, and RDS publicly-accessible instances. For workload-specific scope we cover EKS cluster configuration against the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark, ECS task role permissions, and Lambda function over-privilege.

Microsoft Azure

Azure assessments cover subscription and management group structure, Azure AD tenant configuration, Conditional Access policy review, Privileged Identity Management usage, RBAC assignments at the subscription and resource group level, Azure Policy coverage, Network Security Groups, Azure Firewall and Front Door configuration, Storage Account public access and anonymous-read settings, Key Vault access policies and RBAC, Azure SQL firewall and auditing, Defender for Cloud posture, and Activity Log and Diagnostic Settings retention. Azure-specific findings we chase hard include legacy authentication still enabled, Global Admins without just-in-time controls, Storage Accounts with anonymous blob access, and Network Security Groups still allowing 3389 or 22 from 0.0.0.0/0 after a forgotten troubleshooting session.

Google Cloud Platform

GCP assessments cover organization and folder hierarchy, Organization Policy constraints, IAM bindings at every level, Service Account usage and impersonation paths, VPC and firewall rules, Private Google Access configuration, Cloud Storage bucket ACLs and IAM, Cloud KMS key policies, Secret Manager access, Cloud Audit Logs coverage and retention, VPC Service Controls perimeters, and Security Command Center findings. GCP-specific issues we see often include over-broad primitive roles still in use instead of predefined or custom roles, default service account usage in Compute Engine, and public Cloud Storage buckets left over from experimentation phases.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid

For organizations running across two or three clouds (which is most mid-market enterprises we assess), we apply the normalized control set from CSA Cloud Controls Matrix so the findings are comparable across providers. That lets your security team and your leadership compare apples to apples instead of getting lost in provider-specific nomenclature. We also cover hybrid connectivity points (ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, Cloud Interconnect) because the boundary between cloud and on-premises is frequently where the biggest detection gaps live.

After running cloud assessments across financial services, healthcare, defense manufacturing, professional services, and SaaS companies in and around the Triangle, certain findings recur almost regardless of industry. Knowing what we typically find helps you prepare your team and scope your remediation budget realistically.

Forgotten IAM principals

In most assessments we find between five and fifty IAM principals (users, roles, or service accounts) that have not logged in or been assumed in the past ninety days, some over a year, a few that predate the current engineering team entirely. Each is a latent account-takeover vector. Cleanup is tedious but straightforward once the inventory is surfaced.

Overly permissive cross-account or cross-tenant trust

Organizations set up trust relationships with consulting partners, contractors, or internal sub-accounts at various points, then never tighten the scope. We regularly find trust policies that allow AssumeRole from an entire external account when only one specific principal should have access. Fixable in an afternoon once identified, but genuinely invisible until an assessment surfaces them.

Storage buckets holding sensitive data in public or default-permissioned containers

Not always fully public, but frequently readable by everyone in the organization when they should be restricted to a specific team or application. Database backups, application logs, customer export files, and marketing assets often live in containers that were never properly tagged or ACLed because they started out as low-sensitivity and grew into holding regulated data.

Detection pipelines with silent failures

GuardDuty or Defender producing findings that flow to an unmanaged email inbox. CloudTrail missing in one region. A VPC Flow Log configuration that was disabled during a troubleshooting session and never re-enabled. A SIEM connector that broke after a credential rotation. The detection gap is silent until an incident makes it visible.

Identity provider misconfiguration

Azure AD tenants with Security Defaults disabled but without fully-configured Conditional Access replacement policies. Federated IAM trust from an on-premises Active Directory that got out of sync. Break-glass accounts that are no longer documented or reachable. Identity is where nearly every cloud breach starts; identity is where every cloud assessment spends the most time.

You have choices for cloud security assessors. The big consulting firms will do the work, charge you more, and hand you a report that feels impressive in a boardroom. The boutique security firms will be faster, but many lack the operational experience to help you actually close the findings. The cloud provider's professional services team will bias toward their own tooling. We sit in a specific spot that suits most clients we work with.

We are a regional firm with more than two decades in the Triangle, a CMMC-AB Registered Provider Organization (RPO #1449) with a practice lead who owns that scope, and a team of engineers who operate the same cloud environments we assess for clients under our managed IT and managed cybersecurity services. That matters because an assessment written by engineers who have never built or operated the kind of environment they are reviewing tends to produce findings that are technically accurate but operationally naive. Our reports are written by people who will still be answering your questions ninety days after delivery, and we know what a realistic remediation plan looks like because we have executed hundreds of them.

We do not resell the CSPM platform or SIEM we might end up recommending, which means the recommendation is independent of our revenue. We do not subcontract assessments to overseas teams; the engineer writing your report is the engineer running your scans. And we do not upsell into unnecessary work; our engagement letters define scope crisply and our invoices match them.