Unlocking Cloud Security: The Top Identity Mistakes Companies Are Making
As businesses migrate more of their critical infrastructure to the cloud, the traditional security perimeter has dissolved. Today, identity is the new perimeter. Securing who has access to what—and when—is the cornerstone of a modern cybersecurity strategy.
However, a close look at real-world cloud environments reveals a pattern of common, yet dangerous, identity security mistakes. These oversights create silent vulnerabilities that attackers are all too eager to exploit. By understanding these pitfalls, you can take decisive action to fortify your organization’s cloud posture.
Here are the most critical cloud identity security mistakes organizations are making right now.
1. Excessive Permissions and the Abandonment of Least Privilege
The most prevalent and damaging mistake is granting identities—both human users and machine service accounts—far more permissions than they need to perform their jobs. This often happens for the sake of convenience, but it drastically expands your attack surface.
The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) dictates that an identity should only have the absolute minimum permissions required. In practice, this rule is frequently ignored. Developers are given broad administrative rights to speed up projects, and third-party tools are granted sweeping access to your environment.
The reality is stark: analysis shows that over 90% of identities are using less than 5% of the permissions they are granted. This means that if a single one of these “over-privileged” accounts is compromised, an attacker gains a massive set of capabilities they can use to move laterally, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate data.
Actionable Tip: Implement a continuous process for auditing and right-sizing permissions. Use cloud-native tools or specialized platforms to analyze permission usage and identify unused privileges. Start by focusing on your most critical roles and service accounts, systematically revoking any access that is not essential.
2. Neglecting Inactive and Stale Identities
What happens when an employee leaves your company or a project is decommissioned? Too often, their user accounts and the associated service roles remain active. These “stale” or “dormant” identities are forgotten relics that pose a significant security risk.
Since they are not being actively monitored, they become prime targets for attackers. A compromised dormant account with lingering permissions can provide a stealthy, long-term backdoor into your cloud environment.
Think of it as leaving the keys to your old house under the doormat indefinitely. Eventually, someone is bound to find them. Dormant user accounts and unused service roles represent a significant, unmonitored attack surface that must be actively managed.
Actionable Tip: Establish an automated lifecycle management process for all identities. Your policy should ensure that accounts are immediately deactivated as part of the employee offboarding process. Furthermore, implement a rule to automatically disable any account that has been inactive for a set period, such as 90 days.
3. Inconsistent Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Enforcement
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is one of the single most effective controls for preventing unauthorized access. However, its effectiveness is completely undermined when it is not applied consistently across the board.
Many organizations enforce MFA for their general user base but create exceptions for privileged users, system administrators, or service accounts, often citing operational friction. This is a critical error in judgment. These are precisely the accounts that need the most protection.
A single compromised password for a high-privilege account without MFA can be catastrophic, potentially leading to a complete takeover of your cloud environment. The most critical mistake is failing to enforce MFA on highly privileged accounts, including root users and administrative roles.
Actionable Tip: Make MFA mandatory for all human users, without exception. Use conditional access policies to enforce MFA based on risk factors like location, device, or sign-in behavior. For service accounts, prioritize using more secure authentication methods like managed identities or roles instead of long-lived credentials.
4. Relying on Insecure Default Settings
Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer an incredible array of powerful services, but they operate on a shared responsibility model. While they secure the underlying cloud infrastructure, you are responsible for securing everything you configure in the cloud—including your identities and their permissions.
Many organizations mistakenly assume that the default configurations for roles and services are secure out-of-the-box. This is a dangerous assumption. Default settings are often designed for ease of use, not maximum security, and can grant overly permissive access.
For example, a default role might grant broad read/write access to a storage service when only read access is needed. Relying on these defaults is a recipe for misconfigurations that can easily be exploited.
Actionable Tip: Never trust default configurations. Your security team should develop hardened, pre-approved security baselines and templates (e.g., Infrastructure as Code templates) for creating new roles and resources. This ensures that the principle of least privilege is built-in from the start, rather than being an afterthought.
Strengthening Your Cloud Identity Posture
Securing your cloud begins and ends with securing your identities. You cannot protect what you cannot see. Gaining full visibility into all identities, their permissions, and their activity is the first step toward a robust security posture.
By proactively addressing these common pitfalls—enforcing least privilege, cleaning up dormant accounts, mandating MFA everywhere, and hardening default settings—you can significantly reduce your risk and build a more resilient cloud environment.
Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2025/07/25/organizations-cloud-identity-security/
