Cloud Security Posture Management: AWS Edition

Migrating to the cloud does not eliminate security risks - it transforms them. AWS's shared responsibility model is clear: AWS protects the infrastructure, you protect your data and configurations. But in practice, AWS security posture management (Cloud Security Posture Management - CSPM) is where most companies fail. Cloud misconfigurations are today the number one cause of data breaches - not sophisticated exploits.

The 5 most common AWS mistakes

In my experience assessing AWS environments: public S3 buckets (still in 2026, despite years of warnings), security groups with ports open to 0.0.0.0/0 (especially SSH and RDP), overly permissive IAM policies (the use of AdministratorAccess as a default policy is epidemic), absence of MFA on root accounts and privileged IAM users, and CloudTrail not enabled or with unmonitored logs. Each of these is a critical attack vector, and each is fixable in minutes.

A practical CSPM framework

My approach to AWS security is built on three pillars: visibility (do you know what you have?), configuration (is it configured securely?), and continuous monitoring (does it stay secure over time?). For visibility: AWS Config for resource inventory and compliance checking, AWS Security Hub to aggregate findings from all security services. For configuration: CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark as baseline, SCPs (Service Control Policies) to restrict dangerous actions at the organization level. For monitoring: CloudTrail + GuardDuty as minimum, ideally with logs sent to your SIEM for correlation.

A tool I recommend to everyone: Prowler (open source). It runs over 300 checks on your AWS infrastructure and produces a detailed report with priorities and remediation. It is the ideal starting point for a cloud security posture assessment. I use it as the first step in every AWS engagement - the results often surprise even teams that thought they had security under control.