Cloud breaches increasingly originate from compromised identities, whether through misconfigured roles, unused service accounts, or incomplete MFA coverage. Once attackers gain a foothold, they often rely on existing access to escalate privileges or move laterally inside the environment.
Despite improvements in cloud-native IAM tools, visibility into who has access and whether those permissions remain appropriate is still limited. Misuse of legitimate credentials frequently goes undetected until damage is done.
Multifactor authentication and cloud infrastructure entitlement management each address different points in the identity attack chain. One prevents unauthorized entry; the other reduces the risk of internal misuse. When deployed together, they provide stronger control over how access is granted, used, and monitored.
The following sections outline how identity risks persist across cloud environments and what it takes to apply practical controls that limit exposure without creating operational overhead.
Why Cloud Identity Risks Persist
Cloud environments often accumulate excessive privileges over time. Identities —whether human or machine — are granted broad access for convenience during deployment and rarely revisited. Temporary roles become permanent, service accounts remain active long after decommissioning, and access keys may be left unused but still valid. Attackers often exploit these overlooked paths instead of attempting to break authentication mechanisms directly.
IAM consoles offered by providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP lack the depth to manage access at scale. Visibility across accounts, mapping of effective permissions, and correlation with actual usage are often missing. Without centralized context, dormant identities and overexposed roles go unnoticed until abused.
Breaches tied to identity misuse continue to surface. One attacker accessed Capital One’s data using a misconfigured IAM role. Others have escalated privileges through forgotten roles with broad access. Failures in visibility and entitlement oversight directly increase the likelihood of compromise.
Multifactor Authentication in Cloud Environments
Password-based access remains the weakest point in cloud identity security. Attackers often bypass credentials through phishing, credential stuffing, or social engineering, and then attempt to circumvent authentication using techniques such as MFA fatigue, token replay, or SIM swap attacks. Without a second layer of verification that is resistant to manipulation, initial access becomes too easy to obtain.
MFA serves as a frontline defense against unauthorized entry, but its effectiveness depends heavily on the method used. Time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) offer limited protection against phishing. Hardware-based keys (such as YubiKeys) and FIDO2-compliant methods provide better resistance, as they tie authentication to the device and cannot be intercepted.
Cloud platforms differ in how MFA is implemented. AWS allows MFA enforcement on root and IAM users but requires additional configuration for roles. Azure supports conditional access policies to require MFA based on location, device, or risk level. Google Cloud integrates MFA with Identity-Aware Proxy and provides hardware key support through Advanced Protection.
Standardizing strong, phishing-resistant MFA across all privileged users and service accounts is necessary to reduce the risk of unauthorized access before privilege escalation occurs.
CIEM for Access Visibility and Permission Management
MFA can block unauthorized entry, but it does not limit what legitimate identities are allowed to do once inside. Most cloud breaches involve not just initial access, but the misuse of standing privileges that were never scoped correctly. Permissions often accumulate as roles evolve, service accounts go unmanaged, or policies are copied without review.
Standard IAM tools display assigned permissions but offer little context about how those permissions are inherited, whether they are still used, or what they permit in combination. Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) fills that gap. It builds a complete inventory of identities — both human and service-based — alongside the effective access those identities hold across accounts.
CIEM continuously analyzes entitlements by examining trust relationships, group memberships, and policy overlaps. Through this analysis, it identifies unused privileges, overextended roles, and indirect access paths introduced through cross-account configurations.
Reducing access safely becomes possible once privilege usage is known. A service account with admin rights but limited activity can be scoped down. Shadow access through federated identities or temporary roles can be surfaced and removed.
Applying these insights consistently requires automation, especially across growing multicloud environments.
Applying Identity Controls at Scale
Organizations often struggle to operationalize identity protection once environments grow in size and complexity. Manual reviews of entitlements rarely keep pace with infrastructure changes, and inconsistent enforcement leads to policy drift.
Automated access reviews can resolve this gap. Instead of scheduled audits that quickly become outdated, CIEM tools can flag unused privileges and anomalous behavior in near real-time. Paired with identity analytics, these insights can guide revocation workflows and access certification processes across cloud accounts.
Signals from MFA enforcement and CIEM telemetry should feed into broader detection and response systems. Integrating with SIEM or SOAR platforms helps correlate identity activity with other indicators of compromise, such as suspicious network traffic or unapproved resource access. Tying identity signals to automated playbooks accelerates containment.
Identity validation cannot be treated as a one-time check. A Zero Trust approach enforces continuous verification, checking whether the identity, context, and action remain aligned with policy. MFA confirms the legitimacy of the session, while CIEM verifies whether the requested action matches the expected access profile.
Together, these controls move identity protection from static configuration to continuous governance.
How Saner Cloud Addresses Cloud Identity Security
Saner Cloud continuously collects identity data across AWS and Azure environments, providing detailed visibility into all cloud identities, including users, groups, roles, and service accounts. It analyzes attached policies, group memberships, inline permissions, and trust relationships to build an accurate map of effective permissions for each identity. Direct and inherited access are revealed, uncovering entitlements often overlooked by native IAM tools.
Excessive privileges and unused or orphaned identities are detected, reducing attack surfaces and limiting opportunities for lateral movement. Misconfigurations such as missing multi-factor authentication on privileged accounts and overly permissive policies receive alerts for corrective action. Saner Cloud correlates identity risks with vulnerability and misconfiguration data from the same cloud infrastructure, enabling teams to prioritize remediation based on comprehensive risk assessments.
Automated workflows enable removal of unnecessary permissions, enforcement of multifactor authentication, and deactivation of dormant accounts. These continuous controls maintain least privilege across rapidly changing cloud environments and support compliance with standards such as CIS and NIST. A centralized dashboard consolidates findings to simplify access reviews, audits, and governance efforts.
Integration of identity security within broader cloud posture management helps organizations proactively detect and mitigate identity-based risks before exploitation, preserving cloud infrastructure integrity and security.
Strengthening Cloud Identity Security with Saner Cloud
Securing cloud identities requires continuous vigilance across complex, multicloud environments. Saner Cloud combines comprehensive CIEM capabilities with integrated vulnerability and configuration management to deliver end-to-end identity security. Its continuous entitlement analysis, risk prioritization, and automated remediation workflows reduce attack surfaces and maintain least privilege policies at scale.
Organizations gain unified visibility into identity risks alongside broader cloud security posture insights, enabling faster, data-driven decisions to prevent identity-related breaches. Saner Cloud’s centralized dashboard simplifies governance and compliance, helping teams maintain control as cloud infrastructures evolve.
Take the next step in fortifying your cloud environment. Experience how Saner Cloud can transform your identity and access management by requesting a personalized demo today.