Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud security challenges

Running workloads across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem infrastructure gives your organization increased operational flexibility. Still, it also creates serious cloud security challenges, especially in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments.

Each environment has its own identity model, policy language, logging approach and control framework, making consistent governance challenging.

Security teams often juggle conflicting configurations, like cloud-native encryption defaults, cloud identity federation settings and logging schemas.

These differences create risk, including gaps in coverage and an increased chance of oversight and human error.

A misconfiguration in AWS might have no immediate impact, but if it connects to an over-permissioned Azure identity or a misconfigured on-prem file share, the exposure can escalate.

This complexity compounds as teams scale. With different DevOps pipelines, tools and security postures across environments, cloud and identity misconfigurations become harder to detect and fix. The result is a fragmented attack surface where lateral movement is easier for attackers.

While AWS, Azure and GCP offer similar security principles, their implementation varies.

AWS relies on identity and access management (IAM) policies, Azure uses role-based access control (RBAC) and GCP manages access through service accounts and resource-level permissions.

These differences lead to provider-specific risks.

• AWS may allow wildcard permissions like s3:*, introducing broad data access.
• Azure may permit stale user objects or under-enforced conditional access.
• GCP often defaults to permissive service accounts that rarely align with least privilege.

Hybrid cloud risk increases when services bridge these platforms. For example, a GCP function may pull telemetry from an Azure virtual machine using an API key stored in an unmanaged secrets manager.

If an attacker compromises the key, it grants access to systems across both clouds.

In the shared responsibility model, your cloud provider handles the infrastructure, but you secure things like identities, workloads and configurations.

Hybrid cloud security challenges frequently stem from configuration drift and inconsistent identity enforcement.

Among the most common issues:

• Unrestricted access to storage, containers or APIs
• Excessive IAM privileges, stale service accounts or orphaned access keys
• Unmonitored traffic flows between clouds or between cloud and on-prem systems
• Gaps in MFA enforcement or SSO federation
• Overlapping role definitions across environments

In practice, these flaws combine. A storage bucket in AWS might be left open to the internet. That alone is risky. But if an Azure service principal with unused administrative privileges accesses it and both sides don’t have logs enabled, attackers can exfiltrate data without detection.

Teams struggle to audit permissions or revoke unused access without unified identity governance. This weakens your ability to prevent privilege escalation or lateral movement during an attack.

To stay ahead of cloud risk, you need clear visibility across every environment, but most teams use disconnected tools.

They switch between dashboards, run different scans for each cloud and manage overlapping policies, which creates blind spots, slows things down and adds extra work.

To strengthen multi-cloud visibility:

• Standardize log ingestion across clouds and send data to a centralized SIEM
• Map role and identity usage across platforms to catch over-permissioning
• Scan infrastructure-as-code templates before deployment to prevent drift
• Implement unified tagging and asset inventory practices across clouds and on-prem
• Use shared cloud compliance frameworks like NIST CSF, ISO/IEC 27001 and FedRAMP to guide policy design and reporting

Unified visibility is a necessity for hybrid cloud risk reduction. Auditors and regulators expect proof that your cloud controls work consistently across regions and platforms. Without context that spans clouds, proving encryption, segmentation and access controls are difficult.

A strong multi-cloud security strategy applies consistent practices across environments, even when your tools differ.

Some suggested best practices to reduce hybrid cloud risk:

• Adopt federated identity to unify access control and reduce credential sprawl
• Use single sign-on (SSO) and conditional access across all environments
• Audit service accounts, roles and permissions for unnecessary access
• Monitor toxic combinations of misconfigurations, identities and sensitive data
• Implement policy-as-code to apply the same enforcement rules across cloud and on-prem infrastructure
• Incorporate runtime telemetry to correlate configuration state with behavior

This approach strengthens your ability to enforce least privilege and reduces noise in detection pipelines. Instead of chasing alerts from different tools, your team focuses on the real cloud security challenges.

Looking for ways to map these connections in real time? Explore how exposure management in the cloud helps unify risk context and break exploit paths before attackers can move laterally.