Securing Federal Cloud Environments: Overcoming 5 Key Challenges with Tenable Cloud Security

U.S. government agencies face unique challenges as they adopt cloud technologies to meet digital modernization initiatives and adhere to a cloud-first policy. Here’s how Tenable Cloud Security FedRAMP can help. 

As part of digital modernization initiatives and the U.S. government’s cloud-first policy, federal agencies are rapidly adopting cloud technologies to improve operational effectiveness and increase mission agility. Yet, as agencies expand their footprint across hybrid and cloud environments, nation-state adversaries and other threat actors are exploiting vulnerabilities unique to these environments. The high-value target of federal systems — where disrupting operations or accessing sensitive data can yield strategic advantage — makes cloud security essential to mission success.

That’s why Tenable has partnered with the U.S. General Services Administration’s OneGov program to deliver Tenable Cloud Security FedRAMP at a substantial discount. This partnership removes cost barriers and streamlines procurement, enabling agencies to accelerate zero trust adoption, strengthen cloud defenses, and meet compliance requirements faster.

"Our goal is to make cloud adoption secure and effective by helping agencies reduce risk while safeguarding critical data and enabling mission success."

— Mark Thurmond, Tenable Co-CEO, Tenable Partners with GSA OneGov To Help Federal Government Boost Its Cloud Security

Federal agencies face a distinct set of challenges in securing the cloud — including visibility gaps and complex identity and entitlement management. The following sections outline these challenges and show how Tenable Cloud Security helps agencies close them.

1. Limited visibility across complex cloud environments

The challenge: Federal agencies often operate across multiple cloud providers, hybrid environments, and legacy on-premises systems. This complexity makes it difficult to maintain a clear picture of where sensitive workloads, data, and assets reside, as well as how threats can move laterally through the hybrid attack surface. This lack of visibility all too often results in high-risk misconfigurations going unnoticed, vulnerabilities remaining unaddressed, and unauthorized access being exploited by adversaries. Shadow IT further compounds the challenge, creating additional blind spots, leading to a constant exercise of Whac-A-Mole®.

How Tenable Cloud Security helps

• Provides continuous, unified visibility across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, including infrastructure, workloads, identities, and data
• Detects misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and risky identities in real time
• Finds toxic combinations of issues and provides actionable guidance to speed time to remediation
• Prioritizes threats based on exploitability and mission impact
• Consolidates visibility from fragmented point tools into a single platform 

2. Identity and access complexity

The challenge: As agencies expand their cloud usage, the number of users, non-human identities, and permissions to manage grows exponentially. Without proper oversight, excessive permissions and inconsistent identity policies can lead to insider threats, privilege creep, and unauthorized access to sensitive systems. In dynamic cloud environments, roles change, temporary accounts are created, and new applications are deployed frequently, making the consistent enforcement of least privilege principals a real challenge. 

How Tenable Cloud Security helps

• Supports zero trust initiatives by managing cloud identities and privileges and enforcing least privilege access across users and workloads
• Continuously monitors identity-related risks, detecting anomalous access patterns or excessive permissions in real time.
• Correlates identity data with runtime behavior, asset sensitivity, and known misconfigurations to uncover toxic combinations — risk scenarios where users or services have dangerous levels of access to vulnerable systems.
• Leverages just-in-time (JIT) access to grant temporary, time-limited permissions only when needed, reducing standing privileges and the attack surface
• Provides actionable insights and remediation guidance for security teams to remediate risky identities quickly and maintain compliance

For more information check out: Identity-First Security: Mitigating the Cloud’s Greatest Risk Vector.

3. Operational complexity and tool sprawl

The challenge: Federal agencies often rely on a patchwork of security tools to monitor and protect their hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Agencies struggle to chase myriad alerts, struggling to piece together a coherent picture of their ever-expanding attack surface. The result? Inefficiencies, redundant costs, and blind spots, along with overwhelmed security teams and slowed response times. Dynamic cloud workloads make it even harder to maintain consistent security policies and ensure compliance with federal mandates. 

How Tenable Cloud Security helps

• Consolidates multiple cloud security tools into a single, unified platform, simplifying operations and alert overload
• Provides centralized visibility across workloads, identities, and cloud infrastructure, eliminating blind spots
• Streamlines security operations, automating vulnerability detection, prioritization, and compliance reporting
• Reduces redundant licensing costs and minimizes manual monitoring efforts, improving operational efficiency
• Supports faster, more informed decision-making so security teams can focus on high-priority risks and mission-critical tasks

For a great overview, check out: Your Map for the Cloud Security Maze: An Integrated Cloud Security Solution That’s Part of an Exposure Management Approach.

4. Rapidly evolving threats and new attack vectors

The challenge: Cloud native attacks — such as API abuse, container exploits, compromised accounts, and misconfigured cloud services — are used to compromise cloud infrastructure. Traditional perimeter tools and legacy security tools often fail to detect these attacks quickly, leaving mission-critical workloads exposed and making it increasingly difficult to maintain real-time situational awareness and prioritize the most critical risks. 

How Tenable Cloud Security helps

• Detects anomalous activity and emerging attack vectors in real time, so security teams can proactively patch high-risk vulnerabilities
• Continuously analyzes cloud resources to find the most important risks, spot unknown threats, and highlight toxic combinations of security issues
• Integrates with incident response workflows to reduce dwell time
• Prioritizes vulnerabilities based on exploitability and mission impact
• Incorporates threat intelligence from the Tenable Research team to help inform risk decisions and prioritizations 

For more insight into cloud risk, check out the Tenable Cloud Security Risk Report 2025

5. Misconfigurations and compliance gaps

The Challenge: Dynamic cloud environments aren’t only a challenge when it comes to identities. Constantly changing workloads, applications, and permissions make it easy for misconfigurations — such as overly permissive storage, unsecured APIs, or incorrect network settings — to slip through the cracks. Even small missteps can expose sensitive data, create vulnerabilities or lead to service disruptions. At the same time, federal agencies must comply with a complex web of mandates and guidelines, and ensure all systems remain compliant.

How Tenable Cloud Security helps:

• Automates compliance and monitoring across cloud workloads with continuous scanning to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and identity risks.
• Provides built-in and custom policies, dynamically assessing risk to achieve compliance with standards such as NIST, CIS, and PCI.
• Enforces identity-first protections, mapping permissions and entitlements to ensure least privilege and quickly remediate risky access.
• Delivers continuous visibility and unified exposure scoring so agencies can prioritize what matters most for mission success and national security.
• Simplifies audit readiness with automated compliance evidence and reporting, reducing manual effort and ensuring agencies can prove adherence at any time.

Conclusion

Securing federal cloud environments is critical to mission success, operational efficiency, and national security. By providing continuous visibility, automated vulnerability detection, identity-first protections, and compliance automation, Tenable Cloud Security FedRAMP empowers federal agencies to confidently modernize their IT environments, mitigate risk, and protect critical workloads from evolving threats.

Whac-A-Mole® is a registered trademark of Mattel, Inc.

Learn more

• Read the blog: Tenable Partners with GSA OneGov To Help Federal Government Boost Its Cloud Security
• Attend the webinar: Cloud Security for Federal Agencies: Threats, Best Practices and the GSA OneGov Advantage
• Visit the Tenable and GSA OneGov webpage to learn more about how Tenable Cloud Security can help boost your cloud security.