Risks and Vulnerabilities from Cloud Misconfiguration

One of the top concerns? Startups , Small businesses or large organizations have in using public cloud is misconfiguration of the environment. Misconfiguration introduces all sorts of risks and vulnerabilities. Risks and vulnerabilities can be from internal or external actors.

The concern is the same across AWS , Azure , GCP or any other cloud

For Startups and Small Businesses misconfiguration can be fatal to their business. Misconfiguration can be in any part of your cloud environment.

Few examples of misconfiguration are :

• Systems are configured with default values in critical operating system files. This allows hackers to exploit known vulnerabilities.
• Firewall/security groups are not set right leading to an opening for someone to hack into.
• Internal systems/processes for allowing access are not defined correctly. This results in enabling higher access than needed.
• For object storage resources like AWS S3 Buckets access permissions are set incorrectly.
• Backups are not configured as per the business requirement. Critical data is not available for restore during a failure.

Misconfiguration also leads to wastage. Your AWS, Azure, GCP cloud monthly spends increase a lot without reason.Understand wastage and how to reduce it here.

Identifying and fixing misconfiguration must be a top priority for all businesses. First step is to ensure misconfiguration is not introduced during architecting or provisioning. The next step is to review the Cloud environment on a regular basis.

Some misconfigured items are easy to spot and correct. But for rest it requires experience and expertise to identify and fix it. If you are not sure, get help from experts. This will protect your Startup and Small business from severe impact.

This whitepaper lists top 11 misconfiguration items and how to correct them. You can download the whitepaper here.