The digital era has prompted leaders to migrate business-critical systems to the cloud, which offers undeniable benefits in terms of agility, flexibility, and innovation. But cloud adoption also carries substantial risks. A major US cloud hosting provider, Snowflake, suffered an unforgettable data breach in 2024. This incident exposed more than 560 million records, including customer records from Ticketmaster, and affected 165 client organizations. AT&T, a telecommunications giant, reportedly suffered collateral damage and paid a ransom of US$370,000 to the hacker to have the stolen data deleted.
This high-profile incident underscores a crucial point—business leaders can outsource the management of critical systems to cloud providers, but they remain accountable for end-to-end governance.
In this article, I share three proven strategies for building effective governance that boost cloud cyber resilience at a fraction of the cost — practical approaches that help organizations materially reduce breach risk while lowering compliance overheads.
Growing Cloud Security Challenges for Enterprises
According to Gartner’s 2025 Cloud Security Report, 99% of cloud breaches stem from customer misconfigurations rather than provider vulnerabilities. This statistic is worrying but not surprising.
Traditional IT governance models, designed for tightly controlled on-premises environments, cannot be easily replicated in cloud settings. Because cloud adoption transfers control over many technical layers, organizations must rethink their governance structures. Applying outdated models introduces critical blind spots in risk management.
Complex cloud supply chains — for example, a SaaS vendor built on another provider’s IaaS — further blur accountability. Hybrid and multi-cloud environments also complicate the shared security responsibility model (SSRM), making it harder to define control ownership between the provider and the consumer.
Unsurprisingly, 71% of organizations claim that adopting public cloud has made cyber risk management harder, as increased cloud adoption and a growing volume of cyber threat data are making exposure management more challenging. Let’s dive into solution mode.
Establish a Cloud Center of Excellence
A Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is an established cross-functional committee. Its mission is to secure cloud adoption and enforce security best practices across the organization.
A high-performing CCoE combines expertise from IT, security, operations, legal, and risk functions, with clearly defined roles and accountability. Its effectiveness depends on executing three non-negotiable responsibilities:
- Align cloud initiatives with business objectives. Every deployment must support strategic outcomes. According to research, 44% of projects fail due to poor alignment.
- Enforce a robust governance structure to manage key risks, safeguard data and privacy, and ensure compliance.
- Educate and enable the organization. Continuous training and knowledge sharing build proficiency and promote the secure, effective use of services. The organization must train all personnel, from cloud administrators and developers to other employees, in cybersecurity and cloud security, using tailored technical modules and targeted awareness sessions aligned with the specific risks faced by each employee’s segment.
The CCoE uses a three-tier cloud security governance hierarchy—structured around policies (e.g., "Protect sensitive data"), control objectives (e.g., "Encrypt all PII storage buckets with AES-256"), and control specifications (e.g., "Enable default S3 bucket encryption using AWS KMS"). Specifications must be tailored to each cloud provider's implementation.
The CCoE also maintains Cloud Registries—a services registry tracking approved services (e.g., AWS PostgreSQL RDS, AWS IAM) and a deployments registry tracking account ownership and business context. These registries provide the visibility and traceability essential for governance and continuous assurance.
Boost Cloud Security Governance
An established CCoE requires three steps to select a cloud provider. First, providers must be classified based on two criteria—data sensitivity (e.g., financial data) and service criticality (e.g., transaction settlement). Second, map the shared security responsibility model to internal roles, ensuring each team understands their duties and can design, implement, and test required controls.
Third, evaluate the provider's security posture, reputation, and compliance capabilities through a structured risk assessment process.
If a cloud provider's native tools can mitigate 80–90 percent of identified risks, build compensating controls for the remainder rather than rejecting the provider outright. This approach maximizes platform capabilities while addressing gaps.
Many organizations mistakenly believe their cloud provider secures their data and access policies—that responsibility remains with the customer. The 2025 Codefinger S3 Ransomware attack exploited this misunderstanding, using compromised AWS credentials to re-encrypt data with AWS's native SSE-C feature, rendering it immediately unrecoverable without the attacker's key.
Compliance is similarly non-transferable. A cloud provider's PCI-DSS certification, for example, does not automatically make customer applications compliant—each organization must secure its own environment. To govern the shared responsibility model effectively, organizations must document the specific division of security responsibilities for each cloud service, assign clear ownership to internal teams, implement automated controls to enforce customer-side obligations, and conduct regular audits to verify both provider and customer controls remain operational.
Maintain Operational Hygiene
Human error drives most critical cloud incidents. Four proven strategies reduce cyber hygiene exposure:
- Harden configuration - Deploy AWS Config to continuously validate configurations and enable CloudTrail alerts for IAM or network-security changes. Run weekly CIS benchmark scans using AWS Security Hub and require formal approval for baseline deviations through AWS Systems Manager.
- Enforce robust identity and access management - Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) where critical data access is needed. Use AWS IAM Roles to adopt Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), prevent privilege sprawl, and enforce the Principle of Least Privilege through finely tuned IAM Policies. Conduct continuous permission reviews via IAM Access Analyzer.
- Secure APIs - Use strong authentication standards such as OAuth 2.0 or JWT tokens, enforce input validation, and minimize exposed data. Deploy AWS API Gateway to govern traffic, apply rate limiting, and monitor usage patterns for anomalies.
- Protect the cloud management console - The AWS Console is a prime target for attackers. Deny root-account use via Service Control Policies (SCPs), enable MFA-deletion protection, configure CloudTrail with log-file validation to immutable S3 buckets, activate IAM Access Analyzer, and apply Control Tower guardrails to prevent disabling monitoring.
Improve Your Cyber Risk Posture Without Breaking the Bank
There are many controls you can implement to secure mission-critical workloads in AWS, but in my experience, having a robust CCoE, effective governance and clean operational hygiene will significantly improve your cyber risk posture without breaking the bank.
