Are Your Cloud Security Strategies Effective in 2025?

Modern technology is advancing exponentially, rapidly rendering conventional cloud security strategies ineffective. How can organizations prepare their cloud environments for the cyberthreats emerging in the new year?

Emerging Threats to Cloud Security in 2025

Information technology professionals should be on the lookout for misconfigured cloud settings, cybercrime-as-a-service, vendor vulnerabilities, and unmonitored nonhuman identities. These will likely be the paramount cloud security threats of 2025.

Misconfigured Cloud Settings

Mistakes become increasingly likely as cloud environments expand. IT professionals make their organizations more vulnerable by misapplying, poorly setting up, or forgetting to enable specific security settings.

Threat actors gain unauthorized access to cloud environments by exploiting these oversights. According to Google Cloud Security’s Threat Horizons report, misconfiguration was the initial access vector in 30.3% of successful infiltration attempts.

Cybercrime-as-a-Service

The democratization of sophisticated cyberattacks is underway. Cybercrime-as-a-service is growing increasingly prevalent as automation advances. Threat groups can quickly pivot to evade detection, allowing more users to leverage their code for longer.

State-Sponsored Cyberattacks

Nation-state cyberattacks are on the rise. The Russia-affiliated threat group Midnight Blizzard successfully targeted Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft — two extremely well-resourced enterprises — in 2024. The group exfiltrated emails and cloud files.

Cloud attacks like these will likely ramp up in 2025 since experts project the cloud’s market value will reach $832.1 billion this year. As more organizations migrate, bad actors stand to gain more sensitive data, intellectual property, and financial details.

Low Visibility Into Vendors

Many companies lack visibility into their cloud vendors, adversely affecting their cybersecurity posture. As of 2024, around 98% of organizations had worked with a third party that experienced a data breach within the previous two years.

Unmanaged or Unmonitored NHIs

Threat actors will increasingly target nonhuman identities — service accounts, cloud instances, access tokens, and application programming interface keys — in 2025 since they are the backbone of internal cloud operations.

When IT employees move on, they often leave NHIs unmonitored. According to one survey, only 20% of organizations have a formal process for offboarding and revoking API keys as of 2024. Even fewer — 16%, to be exact — follow a strict procedure for rolling back or rotating API keys.

Are Your Cloud Security Strategies Outdated?

IT professionals must prepare to face the cyber threats that will emerge in 2025. Crucially, many may not be ready — traditional cloud security strategies are quickly becoming outdated. Approaches that were effective in 2024 may not work nearly as well in 2025.

For one, the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures has dissolved conventional perimeter defenses, as applications and data now continuously move within and between environments. This strategy remains impractical even among organizations that store information in a single public or private cloud because it creates bottlenecks and blind spots.

Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures are particularly dangerous. Research shows around 40% of breaches involve data distributed across multiple cloud environments. Breaches were notably rare when firms stored information solely in a public or private cloud.

The rise of continuous integration/continuous delivery environments is another factor weakening traditional cloud security strategies. Organizations that want to maintain a consistent code base while dynamically integrating code changes face an increased cyber threat risk.

CI/CD environments are attractive to bad actors because they simplify malicious code injection, denial of service, and unauthorized access attempts. If any segment of the process is under monitored, impactful downstream changes are relatively easy to carry out.

Traditional cloud security approaches are quickly becoming outdated even among companies exclusively relying on public or private environments. As artificial intelligence advances, so does the threat landscape. Code is becoming dynamic. A single model can produce thousands of compute instances, breaking review cycles. However, IT teams still operate at human speed.

The Most Effective Cloud Security Approaches

While some conventional cloud security strategies have become obsolete, several approaches should remain effective in 2025.

Zero-Trust Architecture

In a zero-trust architecture, IT places confidence in no person or device. Instead, it leverages access management, sets strict permissions, and repeatedly requires identity verification. This approach shrinks the attack surface, reducing risks.

Centralized Cloud Environment

While multi-cloud and hybrid environments offer unique benefits, they bring security risks. Decision-makers should ask themselves whether they’re ready to accept those vulnerabilities. A sensible alternative is to adopt a private or public cloud.

Centralization is critical. The more control the IT team has over data, the greater its visibility into operations. As a result, it can detect, identify, and contain cyber threats much faster than those with information and applications distributed across environments.

Two-Person Rule

Defending CI/CD environments requires a two-person rule for all code updates to prevent bad actors from compromising downstream environments. Both should be familiar with established best practices and capable of detecting suspicious activity indicative of a breach. Then, firms avoid having a single point of failure for critical applications or data storage systems.

Third-Party Vendor Audits

Since taking a vendor-agnostic approach with cloud computing is virtually impossible, companies should consider routine audits to mitigate risks and ensure compliance from managed service providers.

Tips for Updating Your Cloud Security in 2025

In addition to adopting the most effective cloud security strategies, there are several things IT professionals can do to update their approaches for 2025.

1. Manage Cloud Logs

The hidden benefit of the rise in cybercrime-as-a-service and state-sponsored cyberattacks is that attackers’ strategies and tools will be similar. Even if the volume of threats increases, defending against them should remain feasible with a tactical approach.

Managing cloud logs helps IT professionals categorize threats, informing threat hunting and penetration testing procedures. Smaller firms rely on manual monitoring to avoid the risk associated with third parties, while enterprises should have technologies to mitigate those additional risks.

2. Establish Safeguards and Failsafes

It’s common knowledge that even a single misclick can compromise an entire system. In an interconnected environment like the cloud, this is unacceptable. IT leaders should establish safeguards and fail-safes to address the human error factor.

3. Automate Alert Triage

Security alerts can feel never-ending. Teams spend days — sometimes weeks — sorting through false positives. In addition to being time-consuming, it is also expensive. In the United States, firms spend around $3.3 billion annually on manual alert triage.

Automation is the answer. With AI, employees can automate alert prioritization, evaluation, and confirmation. Advanced algorithms are intelligent enough to recognize when they can and can’t handle tasks, streamlining workflows without sacrificing accuracy.

4. Reassign and Remove NHIs

Only 15% of companies feel highly confident they can prevent NHI attacks. In contrast, 25% feel positive they can avoid attacks leveraging human identities, primarily because NHIs outnumber human identities by a 20-to-1 ratio.

NHIs are essential to operational continuity but can pose security risks. IT workers should leverage mapping to reassign ownership, remove redundant NHIs, and reduce their attack surface.

It Is Time to Overhaul Cloud Security

IT leaders should make a New Year’s resolution to update their cloud security approaches for 2025. The sooner they prepare for emerging cyber threats, the less fallout they will have to deal with when the inevitable breach occurs.