The cloud’s biggest advantage — quick scaling — is also the source of its main peril: clouds are hard to control. New assets spin up, configs drift, and gaps appear, all with a few mouse clicks. Security professionals have found a way to keep it under control at least to some extent by running regular cloud security assessments. In this post, we discuss the different types of those assessments, and what one should be paying attention to when attempting to do one.

What Is a Cloud Security Assessment?

A cloud security assessment is a structured review of your cloud infrastructure, including its architecture, configurations, services, and operational practices, to evaluate how well it’s protected. The purpose of a cloud security assessment is to:

identify risks,
spot misconfigurations or vulnerabilities,
verify security controls,
and ensure that data, identities, and workloads meet both business and compliance requirements.

Essentially, when you’re running a cloud security assessment, you’re answering these three questions:

What assets and services are running in our cloud environment?
Are they configured securely and aligned with compliance frameworks?
What risks are there and how can we reduce or eliminate them?

But aren’t cloud providers supposed to take the burden of securing everything, just like they’ve taken the burden of running the infrastructure? It turns out, you share this responsibility with them.

The Shared Responsibility Model and Why It Matters

Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud operate under a shared responsibility model — meaning some aspects of security are handled by them, while the rest are up to you.

Cloud providers manage the physical infrastructure and core services.
Customers are responsible for how cloud resources are configured, accessed, and secured.

The shared responsibility model differs slightly between cloud providers, and responsibilities also vary depending on what kind of products you’re ordering from them — whether it’s infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or software-as-a-service (SaaS). We won’t be going into much detail in this article, or it would become too long, but if you’re looking for specifics, we suggest that you check out the shared responsibility guides by AWS, GCP, and Microsoft.

Either way, most cloud breaches are caused not by the providers, but by customer-side mistakes: misconfigured storage, open ports, exposed credentials, excessive permissions, and forgotten assets. A cloud security assessment helps identify and correct these exposures before attackers can take advantage.

Types of Cloud Security Assessments

Configuration and Posture Assessments

If not the most common, then the most standard type of assessment, with the goal of checking whether your cloud environment follows security best practices. It aims to find issues like:

Misconfigured or publicly exposed storage
Overly permissive IAM roles
Cloud network misconfigurations
Missing encryption
Limited or no logging and monitoring

The ultimate tool type for this assessment is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), or if you already have an exposure management tool, it would cover some parts of it.

Compliance-Focused Assessments

Organizations bound by regulations need to ensure their cloud setup meets specific standards, and the goal of these assessments is to do exactly that, mapping configurations to compliance frameworks such as:

SOC 2 – Controls around security, availability, and confidentiality
ISO 27001 – Information security management
PCI DSS – Payment card data protection
HIPAA – Protecting health information

A compliance assessment helps prepare for audits and reduce regulatory risk. External attack surface management tools and exposure management tools that are able to generate compliance reports are well-suited for this type of assessment.

Penetration Testing and Adversary Simulation

These mostly manual tests simulate real-world attack techniques to uncover practical weaknesses. They focus on:

Identity abuse and token theft
Privilege escalation
Lateral movement across services
Insecure APIs and misconfigured endpoints
Serverless or container-based risks

Unlike automated scans, adversarial testing shows how attackers could move through your environment in practice. But, just like every other manual thing, they take more time and effort.

Point-in-Time vs. Continuous Assessments

A point-in-time assessment offers a security snapshot — ideal for audits, product launches, or mergers.

But cloud infrastructure is fluid: assets are spun up and down, permissions shift, and code is deployed daily. That’s why many organizations prefer continuous assessments, which track:

Drift from secure configurations
The appearance of unmanaged or shadow assets
Emerging threats and vulnerabilities
Deployment-related misconfigurations

Combining both methods provides a stronger security posture—deep analysis when needed, plus always-on monitoring to catch new risks as they emerge.

What Does a Cloud Security Assessment Usually Include? (Checklist)

A well-executed cloud security assessment covers every layer where risk can emerge. Below, we’ll provide a checklist, but here’s a disclaimer right away — a good assessment is more than just going through the checklist. There will be places where you might need to dig deeper than the checklist suggests.

Here’s what’s typically included:

Overall Security Posture

This high-level view evaluates how well your environment aligns with security best practices and organizational policies. It includes:

Coverage and effectiveness of security controls
Visibility into assets and services
Risk exposure across accounts, regions, and workloads
Alignment with compliance requirements

The goal is to surface gaps and recommend actions to close them.

Network Security

This part of the assessment focuses on how traffic flows within your cloud environment — and how it’s protected. Key areas include:

Ingress and egress rules
Firewall and security group configurations
Public vs. private endpoint exposure
Segmentation between critical workloads

Misconfigured network paths are a common entry point for attackers. Identifying them early reduces unnecessary exposure.

Storage Security

Data storage is often where sensitive information lives, and it’s frequently misconfigured. The assessment looks at:

Storage bucket permissions
Public access settings
Encryption at rest and in transit
Versioning and backup settings

These checks help ensure sensitive data isn’t accidentally exposed or left unprotected.

Access Management

Who can access what—and how—is one of the most important aspects of cloud security. This part of the assessment evaluates:

Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies
Role-based access and least privilege enforcement
Use of multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Key and secret management practices

Overly broad or outdated access controls are often responsible for privilege escalation and data exposure.

Platform-Specific Services and Configurations

Each cloud provider has unique services—serverless functions, managed databases, container platforms, and more. The assessment includes a review of:

Platform-native security tools (e.g., AWS GuardDuty, Azure Defender)
Service-specific configuration settings
Logging and audit trail coverage
Misused or misconfigured managed services

Understanding the security posture of these services helps avoid blind spots, especially as cloud usage grows.

You can download our cloud security assessment checklist PDF and use it as a reference or as a staring point for your own checklist that fits your specific cloud situation.

How to Perform a Cloud Security Assessment in 10 Steps

1. Define the Assessment Type and Scope

Start by identifying the type of cloud security assessment that you need (pick one from the list above). Then, define the clear boundaries for what it should cover:

Identify which environments are in scope (development, staging, production)
List the cloud providers, accounts, and regions to include.
If there are compliance requirements, list them (and the respective frameworks)

2. Inventory Assets in Scope

When you define the scope, you may think that you know what’s in there. The asset discovery and inventory stage helps you avoid surprises during audits and to further detail the scope. The goal of this stage is to map out:

Known assets and services (you already know they are there, but this can show you how they are connected)
Shadow IT — forgotten, abandoned, or undocumented resources (something you didn’t know about, yet they are there)

If you haven’t done it before with a good asset discovery tool, you probably are up for some surprises, as the tool would likely find assets that you haven’t known about, yet that are well within the scope of the assessment.

Don’t skip this stage. Without a complete asset inventory, all further risk analysis will always have blind spots.

3. Perform Threat Modeling

Once assets are mapped, analyze how they could be targeted:

Identify your most critical assets and services (some call them “crown jewels”)
Map out possible attack paths, internally and externally (tools like Attaxion can help here by providing a graph that shows connections between assets)
Understand threat types: misconfiguration, privilege misuse, lateral movement, API abuse

This step helps prioritize the assessment around what matters most to your business.

4. Identify Security Risks

Run an automated scanner across all those assets to look for specific risks:

Vulnerabilities in infrastructure and code
Access control issues and privilege mismanagement (this may require manual review)
Network exposures and open ports
Data privacy concerns and missing encryption (may require manual review for data sensitivity and business context)
Risks in third-party dependencies and outdated components (and this may require a manual review too, as scans would probably find a lot of “technically vulnerable but not exploitable in your particular situation” things)
Misconfigurations in cloud-native tools or services

The goal here is to surface actionable findings.

5. Assess Existing Security Controls

Evaluate how current controls are set up and how well they work to detect and prevent attacks that exploit the identified risks:

Coverage and effectiveness of preventive and detective controls
Logging, monitoring, and alerting configurations
Operational workflows like CI/CD, change control, and incident response readiness

6. Identify What’s Missing

You’ve got a list of issues. You’ve got a list of controls. Compare them against each other, and you get a list of gaps:

Missing technical safeguards (e.g., encryption, MFA, endpoint protection)
Weak or absent governance processes
Incomplete documentation or unclear security policies

Essentially, that’s the main output of a cloud security assessment. But there are a few more steps needed to make it truly actionable.

7. Prioritize Findings Based on Business Risk

Not all risks are equal. Use context to make smart decisions:

Score risks based on likelihood, severity, and asset business criticality
Using that scoring, build a clear, prioritized remediation roadmap

That’s it — that’s the assessment that you can present to the stakeholders. The following steps are there because we want to act on it and

8. Develop a Plan

Translate findings into actionable steps for the organization:

Technical remediation tasks with clear ownership
Policy updates and process adjustments
Enhancements to detection, response, and recovery procedures

Do we need to say that plans should be realistic, time-bound, and measurable? You’ve probably heard it before.

9. Act: Mitigate, Remediate, Build Missing Controls

Now, it’s time to close the gaps:

Just do what you’ve planned. This is where the security improvements you’ve suggested move from paper to production.

10. Keep Monitoring and Improving

And finally, because a one-time assessment isn’t enough (cloud environments change constantly), you want to do it all again:

Set up continuous security monitoring and alerting
Schedule regular reassessments (quarterly or after major changes)
Integrate security checks into DevSecOps pipelines for real-time visibility

It’s relatively straightforward, but pretty hard to implement without proper tooling. A cloud security assessment is only useful if it’s:

complete,
prioritized, and
repeatable.

In practice, teams often run into the same problems: incomplete inventories, too many noisy findings, unclear priorities, and fixes that don’t stick because the cloud changes again a week later. That’s what quality tools and some time spent on automation are supposed to fix.

How Attaxion Can Help With Cloud Security Assessments

Attaxion helps you turn the tide and make cloud security assessments work for you, rather than you spending too much time and effort on them to no avail. Essentially, you need to have time to shift processes in the organization rather than spend it on manually assessing everything. With Attaxion, you can find issues faster, fix the right ones first, and keep your posture under control over time. And free up this precious time that you can spend on changing how your organization approaches cybersecurity. Here’s what Attaxion can help with:

Automated Cloud Asset Discovery (Including Shadow IT)

Attaxion helps you build a complete inventory of cloud-facing assets across environments, including easy-to-miss resources like forgotten services, abandoned instances, and “temporary” deployments that quietly became permanent. That closes one of the biggest assessment gaps: you can’t secure what you don’t know exists.

In addition to a wide variety of reconnaissance techniques, Attaxion has connectors to all major cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, and DigitalOcean. So, whenever something changes there, you’ll see it in your asset inventory.

Continuous Monitoring for Misconfigurations and Vulnerabilities

Instead of relying on one-off reviews, Attaxion continuously and automatically checks for the issues that commonly lead to incidents — exposed services, weak encryption, and known vulnerabilities — so you can catch problems early, not after they’ve been exploited.

Supply Chain and Dependency Visibility

Cloud environments are built on third-party software, libraries, container images, and integrations. Attaxion helps you understand what technologies you’re running, what’s outdated, and where they could be adding unnecessary exposure.

Risk Scoring and Prioritization

Assessments often produce long lists of findings. Attaxion does that too, but it helps you prioritize based on risk, giving you enough data (CVSS, EPSS, CISA KEV, etc.) and context to pick the exposures and weaknesses that matter most, so that your team spends time fixing high-impact problems instead of chasing noise.

Automated Remediation Insights

Attaxion also provides actionable remediation guidance and allows you to create support tickets in one click to speed up remediation. For example, Rand Machine reduced mean time to remediate (MTTR) by 20% after implementing Attaxion. They are now spending the freed-up time to focus on internal asset security and better compliance. You can spend it on whatever needs more attention in your organization’s security posture, knowing that most of the cloud-related stuff is automated and under control.

Reporting for Both Executives and Engineers

You still need to communicate the security findings to different audiences. Attaxion provides dashboards and reporting that work for both:

Executives, who get high-level visibility into risk and security posture trends
Engineering and security teams, who get technical details and clear next steps

Support for Continuous Cloud Posture Management

And finally, Attaxion does it all continuously. Cloud security is not a one-time project. Attaxion supports continuous posture management by helping you monitor changes over time, track improvements, and stay ahead of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities as your cloud footprint grows.

Improve your cloud security posture now. Start your 30-day Attaxion free trial or hop on a demo call to talk with our experts.