Why This Still Matters

Every year, security surveys report the same truth: cloud breaches aren’t usually zero-days — they’re misconfigurations. Gartner still attributes over 95% of cloud security failures to human error or misconfiguration (Gartner 2024).

In 2025, despite new tooling and improved security awareness, some mistakes keep showing up again and again. Here’s a look at the most frequent — and dangerous — missteps you should actively check for.

1️⃣ Overly Permissive IAM Roles

The biggest offender year after year: giving far too many privileges to cloud identities.

• Wildcard policies: *:* permissions on critical resources

• Excessive admin roles: developers with production admin, including delete and escalate privileges

• No resource scoping: forgetting to restrict to project or account-level boundaries

Why it persists?
Convenience. It “just works” in dev, then leaks to prod.

Fix: Adopt least privilege principles and automate role scoping with tools like AWS IAM Access Analyzer or GCP Policy Intelligence.

2️⃣ Publicly Exposed Storage Buckets

S3, GCS, Azure Blob — the classics. In 2025, there are still breaches because teams leave storage buckets readable or writable by AllUsers or Anonymous.

• Fails to block list permissions

• No bucket policy enforcement

• Default public ACLs on prototypes promoted to production

Why it persists?
Rapid prototyping moves to prod without a second look.

Fix: Enforce org-level bucket policies and run routine audits with tools like Cloud Custodian or Checkov.

3️⃣ Missing Encryption Settings

• Databases without at-rest encryption

• Messaging queues (Pub/Sub, SNS, etc.) missing KMS keys

• Secrets in plaintext inside environment variables

Why it persists?
Performance worries or “not needed, it’s behind a VPC” reasoning.

Fix: Automate encryption defaults in IaC templates; validate with policy-as-code (e.g., Open Policy Agent, HashiCorp Sentinel).

4️⃣ Poorly Configured Security Groups / Firewall Rules

Many teams still leave:

• 0.0.0.0/0 open inbound rules for SSH or RDP

• overlapping “allow all” CIDR ranges

• no egress restrictions

Why it persists?
Hard to debug connectivity, so engineers punch holes, then forget to close them.

Fix: Adopt infrastructure as code with clearly defined security group patterns; enforce rules with CI security gates.

5️⃣ Missing MFA and Inactive Credential Rotations

• Root accounts with no MFA

• Service accounts with static keys older than 6 months

• Forgotten developer API tokens

Why it persists?
MFA is “annoying,” and credential rotation seems risky during busy sprints.

Fix: Enforce org-wide MFA with SSO and key lifecycle policies, rotate credentials on a scheduled cadence with tools like AWS Secrets Manager or Vault.

6️⃣ Broken Logging & Monitoring

Cloud teams still deploy:

• No CloudTrail/Cloud Audit logs enabled

• No event-based alerts for IAM changes

• Logs stored in default regions, vulnerable to compliance failures

Why it persists?
Observability budgets get cut or postponed.

Fix: Bake logging and alerting baselines into IaC from day one. “No logs, no production.”

7️⃣ Insecure Container Configurations

2025 is seeing even more container adoption, but:

• Containers run as root

• No seccomp/apparmor profiles

• Base images with CVEs not pinned or scanned

Why it persists?
“Dockerfile copy/paste” culture and fast iteration cycles.

Fix: Enforce secure container baselines with tools like Trivy, Clair, or Anchore; run containers as non-root by default.

Proactive Countermeasures

✅ Automate compliance with policy-as-code
✅ Use shift-left scanning on all pull requests
✅ Run routine audits with tools like Prowler, ScoutSuite, or CloudSploit
✅ Set up guardrails in CI/CD so misconfigurations never merge to main
✅ Train developers on cloud security principles, not just DevOps

Expert Insight

“Cloud misconfigurations will be with us as long as humans write IaC. The only sustainable fix is tight guardrails, continuous validation, and a culture that treats security as a feature, not an afterthought.”
— Liz Rice, Isovalent, and chair of CNCF TAG Security (Cloud Native Security Whitepaper 2024)

Final Takeaway

The cloud doesn’t magically protect you — misconfigurations remain the #1 cause of incidents in 2025.

Fixing them isn’t about hiring more pentesters or rolling out the next new tool. It’s about building a repeatable, guardrail-driven, developer-empowered culture where secure defaults are the path of least resistance.