Cloud investments are projected to surpass traditional IT spending within the next few years. Although many organizations have scaled their cloud initiatives, the returns often fall short of expectations. A major factor behind this shortfall is the frequent presence of misconfigurations, which leave systems and data vulnerable to exposure or unauthorized access.
Here are the top five threats, ranked by severity based on their frequency, impact, and real-world consequences.
1. Misconfiguration and Poor Change Management
Configuration errors remain one of the most frequent causes of cloud breaches. According to a 2024 Gartner report, over 99% of cloud breaches through 2025 will be due to preventable misconfigurations, not flaws in the underlying cloud platform. These errors often include exposed storage buckets, unrestricted access settings, or missing encryption policies.
For instance, 74% of organizations had publicly exposed storage containing sensitive data, increasing the risks of data exfiltration, ransomware, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties.
The complexity of multicloud environments further exacerbates the issue. As enterprises move toward hybrid and multicloud environments, visibility gaps and inconsistent access policies lead to greater risk of human error during provisioning or updates.
To mitigate these risks, organizations should implement strict change control processes, conduct regular audits, and employ automated tools to detect and remediate misconfigurations promptly.
2. Inadequate Identity and Access Management (IAM)
IAM missteps remain a primary vector for cloud breaches, particularly as organizations scale across hybrid and multicloud environments. The 2024 Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Top Threats Report identifies “Insecure Interfaces and APIs” and “Misconfiguration and Inadequate Change Control” among the top threats, both of which are closely tied to IAM failures. These issues often stem from overly permissive access controls, lack of multifactor authentication (MFA), and insufficient monitoring of user activities.
A 2024 Forbes article emphasizes that as businesses expand their cloud footprints, the complexity of managing user identities and access rights increases exponentially. Such complexity often leads to gaps in access controls, making it easier for malicious actors to exploit privileged accounts.
Furthermore, the proliferation of machine identities, such as service accounts and APIs, adds another layer of complexity. Without proper governance, these non-human identities can be exploited to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems. To mitigate these risks, organizations should implement strict IAM policies, enforce least privilege access, utilize MFA, and continuously monitor for anomalous activities.
3. Data Breaches and Unauthorized Data Exposure
Attackers continue to target cloud environments for sensitive data ranging from personally identifiable information to proprietary business logic due to their concentration of high-value assets. Improper access controls, identity sprawl, and API exposure contribute to increased attack surfaces in modern cloud infrastructures.
Misconfigured storage remains one of the most exploited vectors. According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, 40% of breaches involved data stored across multiple environments — public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises — making it more difficult to enforce uniform access policies and response protocols.
The same report confirms that organizations with mature cloud environments saw an average breach lifecycle of 242 days (204 to identify, 38 to contain), compared to 179 days in hybrid cloud models, indicating greater complexity and longer detection timelines in cloud-only environments.
Another serious concern is “shadow data”: Information assets that reside in unknown, ungoverned, or undocumented locations. IBM notes that breaches involving shadow data took 26.2% longer to identify than breaches where data assets were fully catalogued.
Traditional perimeter-based defences are largely ineffective in such environments. A zero-trust approach combined with automated discovery of data assets, encryption enforcement, and behavioural monitoring at the workload level is more effective in preventing unauthorized access and lateral movement.
4. Software Supply Chain Attacks
Software supply chain attacks exploit vulnerabilities in third-party libraries, code repositories, and vendor relationships. Attackers target the development lifecycle by infiltrating the tools or components used to build or deploy software, often embedding malicious code into the final product. Once this code is deployed, it can impact every organization that integrates the affected software, spreading the breach across their cloud infrastructure.
These attacks are increasingly difficult to prevent because modern software development involves a complex web of open-source components, dependencies, and vendor integrations. Compromise of a single component can provide attackers with access to a wide range of organizations.
To mitigate these risks, organizations should:
- Conduct comprehensive security assessments of third-party vendors.
- Use Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) to track all components and dependencies.
- Implement rigorous patch management and dependency scanning tools.
- Adopt secure coding practices and incorporate threat modelling early in the software development lifecycle.
These steps help improve visibility and limit the risk of malicious code infiltrating production environments.
5. Insecure APIs
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are foundational to cloud-based systems, facilitating data exchange between services, users, and third-party applications. Their widespread use, however, also makes them a primary attack vector. When APIs lack proper security controls, attackers can exploit them to bypass traditional protections, exfiltrate sensitive data, or execute unauthorized actions.
Common API-related vulnerabilities include:
- Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA): Improper access checks allowing users to manipulate resource identifiers and access other users’ data.
- Broken Function Level Authorization: Lack of segregation between user roles, enabling privilege escalation.
- Excessive Data Exposure: APIs returning more data than necessary, including sensitive fields not required by the client.
- Improper Rate Limiting: APIs that do not enforce thresholds are susceptible to brute-force attacks and enumeration.
- Lack of Input Validation: Attackers can exploit parameters with malformed or malicious payloads to manipulate backend systems.
Mitigation demands a secure-by-design approach. Implementing strong authentication and authorization mechanisms, encrypting data in transit, validating all inputs, and adopting API gateways for centralized control are fundamental. Development teams should treat APIs as attack surfaces and subject them to regular security testing — static and dynamic analysis, schema enforcement, and behavioral monitoring.
Cloud Security Threats Require Comprehensive and Proactive Defence
Cloud adoption introduces significant operational advantages, but it also expands the attack surface in ways many organizations are not structurally prepared to defend. The five threats outlined above (ranked by severity) reflect a shift in how cloud infrastructure must be monitored, controlled, and hardened. Effective defense strategies demand architectural discipline, real-time visibility into configurations and identities, and a security model that treats every workload, API, and access request as a potential risk vector. Without these foundational controls, even the most advanced cloud deployments remain vulnerable to avoidable compromises.
Mitigating Cloud Security Risks with Saner Cloud
The five critical cloud threats — misconfigurations, IAM gaps, data exposure, insecure APIs, and supply chain weaknesses — stem from fragmented visibility and inconsistent controls across multicloud environments. Saner Cloud addresses these risks through a unified, technically rigorous approach.
Saner Cloud is a fully integrated CNAPP platform, combining Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Security Asset Exposure (CSAE), and Cloud Security Posture Anomaly detection (CSPA) into a single workflow. It enables security teams to visualize, audit, and remediate risks across AWS and Azure with precision and speed.
Its CSPM engine enforces benchmarks from CIS, NIST, and SecPod Default, automatically flagging and prioritizing misconfigurations across services, regions, and accounts. For IAM gaps and over-permissioned roles, Saner Cloud evaluates excessive privilege categories and flags insecure configurations using continuous policy validation. The CSAE dashboard highlights publicly accessible assets, deprecated services, and compliance gaps, helping teams isolate exposures before they become breaches. Meanwhile, CSPA scans for behavioral anomalies, detecting drift, misused identities, and risky deviations that evade static checks.
Saner Cloud does more than just reporting. It operationalizes cloud security with real-time insights, automated remediation paths, and continuous anomaly detection, giving your security teams the control and context needed to stay ahead of threats.
See how Saner Cloud can help you prevent cloud-based attacks with maximum precision.