Top 10 Cloud Security Tips to Consider

Why Cloud Growth Demands Stronger Security

Migrating business workflows to the cloud offers scalability and flexibility, while enabling the rapid deployment of digital services and reducing costs. With significant benefits on offer, it is no surprise that the cloud is consuming enterprise IT, transforming the way businesses of all sizes run their operations and deliver their products and services.

The 2025 Cloud Security Report from Check Point shows how prevalent cloud environments have become, with 62% of organizations expanding their cloud edge technologies like SASE and 57% expanding hybrid cloud deployments in the past year.

Cloud Security Threats

But while rapid cloud adoption offers many benefits, it also expands your attack surface, increasing the risk and impact of potential attacks. These include:

• Cloud Misconfigurations: Organizations relying on multiple, fragmented cloud environments must ensure each is adequately set up and managed with optimal security settings. Misconfigurations in cloud products can create security gaps for attackers to exploit.
• Insecure APIs: Key components of cloud environments that enable communication between different systems, APIs can provide access to sensitive data and business resources when not properly secured. Examples include poor authentication, excessive permissions, or unvalidated inputs.

• Compromised Accounts: Cyber criminals steal credentials or exploit weak access and authentication controls to take over accounts and gain unauthorized access.

• Advanced Persistent Threats (APT): Longer-form attacks that don’t immediately reveal the intruder’s presence. Instead, the attacker hides on the network, stealthily gathering or exfiltrating data and waiting to identify new opportunities or launch a larger-scale attack.

• Insider Threats: Internal users accidentally compromising the cloud network or maliciously launching an attack from within, using their access to expose data or manipulate business logic.

• Denial of Service Attacks (DoS): Preventing real users from accessing cloud services and disrupting business operations by overwhelming them with illegitimate traffic.

All of these threats can lead to major data breaches, service disruptions, and compliance violations. Businesses that fall victim can quickly lose vast sums of money in remediation efforts and fines, while also ruining their reputation and scaring away customers.

With increasingly fragmented cloud environments to target and AI-driven threats improving attack success rates, cloud incidents are on the rise. Data from Check Point’s 2025 Cloud Security Report found 65% of organizations had a cloud-related security incident in the last year, up from 61% for the year before. Additionally, 68% of organizations state AI is a cybersecurity priority. But only 25% are confident they can counter AI-driven threats.

The Underperformance of Existing Cloud Security Strategies

To protect increasingly complex cloud environments against new and more sophisticated attack vectors, organizations need a robust cloud security strategy that delivers advanced threat detection, comprehensive coverage, real-time response, secure development practices, and multi-layered safeguards.

However, the 2025 Cloud Security Report lays bare the underperformance of current strategies and tools, including:

• Only 9% of organizations that experienced a cloud security incident in the past year detected the threat within an hour.
• Only 6% solved the security incident within an hour, 62% took longer than 24 hours to remediate it.
• Only 35% of incidents were detected with cloud security monitoring tools; the rest were reported by employees, audits, and third parties.
• Only 17% of organizations have visibility into lateral cloud traffic, creating potential security gaps.

To improve these statistics and help your organization deploy effective cloud security controls, we’ve compiled a list of cloud security tips that can make a meaningful difference to your strategies.

Top 10 Cloud Security Tips

#1. Adopt Decentralized, Prevention-First Cloud Security Strategies

A decentralized cloud security strategy distributes security controls across workloads, applications, and endpoints to reduce your reliance on a single perimeter. As cloud services and SaaS applications make your data and systems more accessible, distributing them throughout the cloud, the idea of a traditional perimeter-based security model becomes less viable. Examples of decentralized security controls include encrypting all data in transit, not just when it leaves a trusted network, and implementing access controls for every asset.

A prevention-first approach shifts the focus from reacting to cloud incidents to proactively stopping them. Through continuous monitoring of cloud activity and advanced detection techniques, prevention-first cloud security can minimize risk and catch attacks before they can develop into significant issues.

#2. Gain Complete Multi-Cloud Visibility with Real-Time Telemetry

Complete, real-time visibility of cloud traffic is a fundamental aspect of prevention-first security. You can’t proactively identify and respond to threats without a real-time understanding of cloud activity. This includes monitoring resources, traffic, and configurations across evolving cloud environments.

Deploying real-time telemetry enables you to track activity across edge, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments without blind spots. Combining data from various sources (endpoints, APIs, identity systems, etc.) helps detect suspicious activity, such as unauthorized logins, spikes in data transfers, configuration changes, and much more.

This telemetry data should be fed into a centralized dashboard covering your entire cloud network across different providers and applications. This simplifies operations and enables security teams to spot suspicious activity and rapidly respond to potential threats. By correlating events from multiple sources, security teams can detect complex attack patterns that span services, regions, and providers – before they cause serious damage.

#3. Harness AI-Powered Threat Detection

All this data can be converted into actionable insights by leveraging AI and machine learning threat detection technologies. AI excels at ingesting vast datasets, such as network traffic, user behavior, and SaaS application requests, then identifying previously unseen patterns or activity that deviates from normal operations.

For cloud environments, this means detecting account hijacking attempts, abnormal API calls, or data exfiltration before they escalate. But it also means AI can flag previously unknown attack vectors in real time. In contrast, traditional signature-based threat detection is restricted to known attacks, comparing cloud traffic to patterns indicative of past threats.

AI-powered monitoring tools also improve threat detection accuracy, reducing false positives that clog up alert feeds and waste resources that could otherwise be used to investigate real attack attempts. Finally, pairing AI analytics with automation allows security teams to reduce response times significantly.

#4. Automate Your Cloud Incident Response Safeguards

Incident response plans provide a structured approach to containing and remediating threats. They aim to minimize the impact of attacks, recover data, and get businesses back to normal operations as quickly as possible.

Automating aspects of your incident response plan can significantly improve remediation efforts, reducing reaction times for security controls without waiting for manual intervention. In cloud environments, this agility is vital given the speed at which attackers can move laterally.

Examples of automated incident response workflows include:

• Isolating compromised resources
• Revoking suspicious credentials
• Blocking malicious IP addresses
• Enforcing advanced authentication procedures

#5. Implement Dynamic Risk-based Access Controls

Static access policies can’t keep up with dynamic cloud threats. Adaptive controls utilize contextual information to understand the risk each access request presents, then decide whether to allow, block, or allow with enhanced security controls such as additional authentication mechanisms.

Considering factors like typical user behavior, location, device health, and time of day, advanced Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools can determine if an access request follows standard user patterns or differs from the norm.

This adaptive approach also aligns with zero trust principles, ensuring access is continuously verified rather than granted indefinitely. By tailoring access decisions to real-time risk, organizations can minimize disruption for legitimate users while making it significantly harder for attackers to exploit compromised accounts.

#6. Shift Security Left with DevSecOps

Shifting security testing “left” in the development lifecycle ensures vulnerabilities are caught and resolved before applications are deployed. DevSecOps, the integration of security into development operations, allows organizations to embed tests and scans into CI/CD pipelines to catch a range of issues, including misconfigurations, weak credentials, and insecure code.

Not only does this enhance application security, but it can also reduce costs associated with reworking software or delivering a new update. DevSecOps also promotes collaboration between development, operations, and security teams, fostering shared responsibility for cloud security.

#7. Keep Software Up-To-Date With Patch Management

While DevSecOps helps minimize the risk of vulnerabilities in your own software, proper patch management programs reduce the likelihood of exploits in the third-party software you use.

Patch management is a critical yet straightforward defense against cloud vulnerabilities. Hackers who find new software vulnerabilities, or zero day exploits, have the opportunity to launch large-scale attacks before organizations can respond. Patch management ensures operating systems, applications, containers, and cloud services are running the latest, most secure version. This minimizes the window of opportunity between a new vulnerability being identified and it being patched out of the software.

#8. Uncover Weaknesses with Regular Audits and Testing

Routine security assessments and audits help reveal network weaknesses before attackers can exploit them. In cloud environments, this means testing not only applications and systems but also configurations, IAM policies, and API security. For example, as you adapt or introduce new cloud workflows, it is easy for configurations to drift from optimal security settings. By auditing your cloud environments, you can identify potential misconfigurations that create gaps in your data security on the cloud and compliance issues.

You should also incorporate regular penetration tests that simulate real-world attack scenarios, uncovering risks that automated tools may miss. These tests should feed into incident response plans to minimize the risk associated with different threats.

These audits and tests are especially important in dynamic cloud environments, where frequent changes can introduce new vulnerabilities. By identifying gaps early, organizations can address them proactively and maintain a stronger security posture over time.

#9. Run Regular Cloud Security Training Programs

Even the most advanced cloud security strategies are undermined by human error or users not understanding the cloud security tips and behaviors that minimize risk. Regular training ensures employees are aware of cloud security policies and the reasoning behind them. Examples of beneficial training outcomes include the ability to identify new phishing attempts and staff following cloud data security practices.

Training can also demonstrate the value of cloud security strategies and help create institutional buy-in across the workforce. Rather than enforcing a series of cloud security controls and processes on your employees, they actively understand them and choose to implement them to improve protection. By creating a culture of security awareness, organizations reduce the likelihood of user mistakes and accidental breaches.

#10. Consolidate Cloud Security Tools

Data from the Check Point 2025 Cloud Security Report shows 71% of organizations utilize over 10 cloud security tools to monitor their systems, and 16% have over 50. Managing many disconnected security tools creates unnecessary complexity and potential blind spots. In contrast, consolidating tools into a unified cloud security platform simplifies operations, improving visibility and reducing the risk of misconfigurations.

With a single, centralized solution, you can remove data silos and correlate data from multiple sources to ensure consistent policy enforcement from a single dashboard. Consolidation can also lower operational costs by reducing duplicate capabilities and minimizing training requirements.