Your First Cloud Security Assessment: A Complete Guide & Checklist

How good is your organization’s cloud security? Sounds like a simple question, but it can be tough to answer. With so many competing business priorities, it’s often difficult to know what is running in cloud environments, let alone how or where. However, not knowing the answer could lead to many costly and undesirable outcomes, such as compliance violations, outages, and worst of all, data breaches.

This is where Cloud Security Assessments come in. Cloud Security Assessments are a great way to identify risks in your cloud environment and develop a plan to reduce them over time.

In this blog post, we’ll break down what a Cloud Security Assessment is, how to conduct one, and tips and tricks on how to get the most value out of them.

What is a Cloud Security Assessment?

A Cloud Security Assessment is a comprehensive evaluation of your cloud environment's security posture. These assessments primarily focus on three goals:

Understanding your cloud infrastructure: You may have more subscriptions and resources than you might have thought. It’s impossible to secure things that you do not know about, so understanding the breadth of all your cloud assets is paramount.

Identifying security gaps: Once the scope of the review is set, we can examine controls, cloud architecture, and internal processes to ensure they comply with security and compliance baselines.

Creating a plan to reduce risks: Achieving full cloud compliance may take some time. Set a realistic timeline for addressing identified risks. Risks should be prioritized, planned, and addressed accordingly.

Why should you conduct a Cloud Security Assessment?

Cloud Security Assessments offer several significant benefits:

Understanding and Managing Risk

“Knowing is half the battle”. Understanding how your infrastructure is configured and how an attacker might approach it will help you identify weak points and make it easier to plan and prioritize setting up defenses.

Regulatory Compliance

Many Compliance regulation frameworks, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, require periodic security assessments. Regular cloud security assessments ensure that evidence is available for audits and reduce the risk of fines and legal consequences.

Incident Response

If you are dealing with an incident, a cloud security assessment can help quickly identify the root cause. Assessments can also help prevent future incidents by identifying new risks through variant analysis.

Emergent Threats

Best practices today may not be best practices tomorrow, as cyber threats evolve. Regular cloud security assessments help ensure that your infrastructure is always up to date with the most current security measures.

How Often Should You Run an Assessment?

Once per year is the industry norm for a baseline check; you may need to assess more frequently in certain situations:

Major changes to your cloud infrastructure. Migration to a new service or onboarding a new vendor? Probably a good idea to reassess.
Extra risky assets. Not all assets are created equal; systems with higher criticality or more sensitive data need more frequent reviews.
Threat landscape shifts: New exploits and emerging threats mean new risks. Stay proactive by reassessing your cloud security anytime a significant exploit is identified that could impact your organization.
Budgetary constraints: Ensure you can allocate appropriate people, tools, and time to an assessment. A rushed or incomplete assessment is almost as bad as none at all.

What are the steps for a Cloud Security Assessment?

There are seven main steps for a Cloud Security Assessment:

Define the Scope

Start by setting the boundaries of what you will evaluate. Which cloud accounts are most important? What datasets and applications need to be secured? Ensure the scope encompasses your services with the highest risk without being overly broad, to stay within budget. Create an Asset Inventory

Inventory all assets in scope. Enumerate all servers, storage accounts, applications, and network components. Document any integrations these components have and their current configurations.

Create a Security Baseline

Establish a security baseline for your cloud based on your organization’s compliance requirements. This may include controls such as “no public storage accounts” or “no unauthenticated service-to-service communication.”

A good starting point for your organization’s baseline is an industry standard such as the Cloud Controls Matrix.

Evaluate Existing Security Controls

Compare your baseline against your inventory of cloud assets. Check that all configurations are set to appropriate values, and run vulnerability scans against all hosts. Note any non-compliant hosts and configuration options.

Perform Testing on the Environment

Validate risks dynamically. Run a small penetration test against your cloud environment to evaluate how your applications respond to targeted attack vectors. This will help identify risks that static configuration checks may miss.

You can target your attacks using industry standards such as MITRE’s ATT&CK Matrix to simulate threats similar to those posed by actual attackers.

Create a Remediation Plan

Now that risks have been identified and validated, develop a remediation plan. It may take some time to fix all the issues, so prioritize the most critical ones.

As you work through the remediation plan, document all changes and verify that fixes resolve the underlying risks.

Set up continuous monitoring

To prevent regressions in your cloud security, continuously monitor for changes. Set up alerting, observability tooling, recurring vulnerability scans, and schedule future cloud security assessments.

Cloud Security Assessments Checklist

Here’s a checklist of key areas to dig into during an assessment:

Identity and Access Management

Cloud security begins with ensuring that only appropriate users have access to your resources, with the proper permissions.

Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all accounts, especially admins
Review user, group, and role permissions for least privilege
Disable or remove inactive accounts and unused credentials
Monitor for excessive permissions (e.g., wide * privileges)

Data Security and Classification

Sensitive data should be protected throughout its lifecycle.

Apply data classification and labeling for sensitive or critical resources
Verify that all sensitive data at rest is encrypted
Ensure all data in transit is encrypted
Limit access to storage buckets and databases
Ensure secure key management processes are followed
Enable automated backups and test data recovery procedures

Network Security

Network security provides both the initial layer of protection against external threats and a defense-in-depth between workloads of varying trust.

Review and tighten security groups, firewalls, and network ACLs
Remove unused VPCs, subnets, or peering connections
Disable public access to services unless absolutely necessary
Use private endpoints or VPNs for secure access
Implement DDoS protection and rate-limiting

Workload and Application Security

You may not directly manage the hosts running your workloads, but you are still responsible for their security.

Scan VMs, containers, and serverless functions for vulnerabilities
Use hardened OS images and secure container registries
Keep all software and dependencies up to date
Check execution permissions
Apply runtime protection or behavior monitoring

Third-Party Risks

Your cloud likely depends on several third parties. You’re only as strong as your weakest link, so ensure your vendors are secure.

Review security requirements and SLAs of third-party vendor contracts
Set up processes for vendor onboarding and offboarding

Logging, Monitoring, and Incident Response

The first and last layer of security response is logging and monitoring. Ensure that sensitive events are logged securely and that anomalous behavior is actively monitored.

Set up alerts for anomalous behavior
Develop and test an incident response plan
Enable cloud-native logging
Centralize logs in a secure, immutable storage

For more information, consult the Cloud Controls Matrix for a prescriptive list of industry-standard security controls.

Next Steps

Running a cloud security assessment can seem like a lot of work, but there’s no better way to improve your cloud security posture. A comprehensive asset inventory and risk remediation plan provides clear, measurable value: a pathway to drive your organization’s security risks to zero.

If you’re just getting started:

Start Small: Your first cloud security assessment doesn’t need to cover everything. Assess IAM policies, run vulnerability scans, and identify the highest risks first.
Prioritize by Risks: Focus first on the most critical assets. Ensure your scope is appropriate for your budget, and address the riskiest assets first.
Build Momentum: Create a schedule and get leadership buy-in. It’s always easier to budget around a schedule, so plan ahead and make sure assessments recur regularly.
Reach out: Running a full cloud security assessment can be easier with a trusted partner; reach out to a trusted partner like Cloud Security Partners today for help getting started.