The Five Most Dangerous Cloud Configuration Mistakes

Public Storage Buckets

This remains the most common and most dangerous mistake we encounter. Storage buckets set to public read or write access have exposed everything from customer databases to internal documents to backup files containing credentials.

The problem is not that cloud platforms make it easy to create public buckets - they do not. The problem is that configuration drift happens over time. A bucket that started private gets modified by a developer testing something. A deployment script contains a configuration that worked in development but should not be used in production. Someone checks "allow public access" to quickly share a file and forgets to change it back.

Enable bucket access logging and monitor it for unexpected access patterns

Use bucket policies to explicitly deny public access at the account level

Implement automated scanning to detect publicly accessible storage

Use pre-signed URLs for temporary sharing rather than making buckets public

Overly Permissive IAM Policies

The principle of least privilege sounds simple: give users only the permissions they need, nothing more. In practice, determining exactly what permissions are needed is challenging, so teams often take shortcuts.

We regularly see service accounts with administrative privileges "just in case" or developer accounts with production access because separating environments seemed too complicated. Every overly permissive policy creates risk.

Cloud platforms provide excellent tools for implementing least privilege, but they require investment in proper identity and access management. Take the time to understand what permissions your applications and users actually need.

Disabled or Misconfigured Logging

Cloud audit logs capture everything happening in your environment: who accessed what resources, what changes were made, what API calls were executed. This information is invaluable for security monitoring and incident investigation.

Yet we routinely find organizations with logging disabled or only partially configured. Sometimes it is disabled deliberately to save costs. Sometimes it was never enabled in the first place. Sometimes logs are being generated but not actually sent anywhere or retained.

Enable comprehensive logging across all cloud services you use. Yes, it costs money. That cost is trivial compared to the cost of investigating an incident without logs or failing to detect a breach because you had no visibility.

Unencrypted Data at Rest

Every major cloud platform offers encryption at rest, often enabled by default for newer services. Despite this, we still find unencrypted databases, storage volumes, and backups.

The most common excuse is legacy systems that were deployed before encryption was standard. The second most common excuse is performance concerns that are rarely justified by actual measurements.

Encrypting data at rest protects against several threat scenarios: physical theft of storage media, unauthorized access to storage systems, and accidental exposure of storage snapshots or backups. The performance overhead is typically negligible on modern systems.

Default or Weak Security Groups

Security groups and network access control lists are your first line of defense in cloud networks. They control what traffic can reach your resources. Yet many organizations deploy resources with overly permissive security groups.

The classic mistake is allowing inbound traffic from anywhere (0.0.0.0/0) on all ports. This is sometimes done during initial setup or testing and never fixed. Even when specific ports are opened, they are often opened more widely than necessary.

Start with the principle of deny-by-default. Nothing should be accessible unless explicitly allowed. When you do allow access, restrict it to specific IP ranges or security groups that need access. Document why each rule exists so future administrators understand the intent.