10 key questions about designing a secure cloud environment

Most organizations think they're secure until an audit, breach, or misstep proves otherwise. So let's change the conversation and talk about what it really means to be secure by design in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Improving security isn’t a zero-sum game between locking down systems and letting teams innovate quickly. There are strategies and systems that can be force-multipliers for development and security. Understanding how to drive cloud security as an enabler for innovation, not a blocker, is the difference between accelerating your digital strategy or suffering an incident that sets you back quarters or even years.

Here are 10 questions every business and technical leader should be asking their cloud and platform teams right now to reduce risk, build software confidently, and stay audit-ready by default.

»1. Do we have full visibility into our infrastructure and cloud estate?

Let's start where all security conversations should begin: with what you can actually see. You can't secure what you can't see, and you can't govern what you don't understand.

Blind spots — whether in shadow IT, unmanaged workloads, or orphaned resources — create silent risks that compound over time. What starts as a temporary environment can turn into a data exposure incident. What seems like a small configuration oversight can lead to major unplanned costs.

Why it matters: In a dynamic, multi-cloud world, visibility isn't a nice-to-have. It's the first step to doing cloud right. You need a single system of record that centralizes real-time insights across all layers of infrastructure and security.

»2. Are teams embedding security across the full development lifecycle?

Infrastructure often grows in the shadows. A developer spins up a test environment for a quick experiment, it works, and they move on. But three months later, that same instance is still alive, costing money, exposing sensitive data, and bypassing your governance model.

Ask your platform team how they're embedding security at every phase of development. Security should be integrated into the workflow, not reviewed after the fact.

Why it matters: With infrastructure as code and automated policy enforcement, your teams can prevent misconfigurations before they ever reach production. Having a shift-left mindset will not only reduce your risk exposure, it will also shorten your audit timelines.

»3. Can we enforce security policies at scale across all environments?

This is where consistency becomes mission-critical and human error becomes your biggest vulnerability. Security doesn't break all at once — it breaks in the gaps. One overlooked policy, one manual misstep, one environment out of sync.

When you're operating across multiple teams and environments, the only way to ensure consistency is through automation. At scale, manual oversight quickly breaks down, and when teams fall behind, risk creeps in.

Why it matters: Policy as code ensures guardrails are always on, always up to date, and always enforced no matter the environment. This creates repeatable, reliable security practices that reduce human error and speed up delivery.

»4. Are our secrets, credentials, and identities protected?

Long-lasting credentials are liabilities hiding in plain sight. Once they're exposed — whether in a public repo, a forgotten script, or an old configuration file — it's already too late.

Attackers are always scanning for these credentials and will eventually find them. The only question is whether they will still work once they find them and try to use them. And if they grant access, how long will they remain usable?

Rotation of credentials and other secrets (keys, tokens, certificates, etc.) is another facet of your environments that must be automated if you’re going to survive in the modern IT landscape. Think about the business impact. Compromised secrets don't just jeopardize systems; they erode customer trust and can trigger regulatory consequences.

Why it matters: Dynamic, short-lived credentials that are generated, rotated, and revoked automatically mean that even if something slips through the cracks, it's useless to an attacker. By the time they find a credential, you’ve already rotated to a new set.

»5. Can we detect and correct drift in infrastructure security?

Drift happens silently and it's one of the most overlooked sources of risk. What is drift? It's when your infrastructure starts to evolve outside of your defined configurations. Maybe someone makes a manual change. Maybe a default setting gets altered. Suddenly, what's running in production doesn't match what's been approved.

This doesn't just affect security posture — it impacts budget too. Resources can balloon without governance, creating untracked cost centers and compliance gaps.

Why it matters: For the business, drift can result in failed audits, runaway spend, and increased exposure without warning. Systems with drift detection can flag these changes, surface discrepancies, and help teams automatically revert to the defined secure state.

»6. Are we securing machine-to-machine and service-to-service access?

Let's move beyond only human-access-based security models because most of your infrastructure isn't managed by people. Machines now outnumber humans in modern infrastructure — and they often have broader access. But too many organizations still treat machine (non-human identity) access like an afterthought.

Without a strong least-privileged access approach with very specific permissions for machines and services, lateral movement becomes easy for attackers. What starts as a minor exploit can escalate quickly, because non-human entities with overly-broad access end up being taken over by threat actors.

Why it matters: Machine identity and trust should be first-class citizens in your applications and infrastructure. Services should only talk to services they're authorized to talk to using identity-based access and encryption. It's zero trust built with purpose and precision.

»7. Do we have proactive risk management in place for human access?

Excessive access is more than a machines and services issue. Many breaches still involve compromised human credentials, and all it takes is one account with access that lasts too long. Now your environment is exposed.

You thought that a basic VPN approach to access would be good enough. It seems to have worked for plenty of enterprises for over a decade.

But the castle-and-moat philosophy of network security is slowly dying — and for good reason. You can’t assume that anyone who has made it through your network perimeter (moat) is a trustworthy actor that can be given wide, unaudited access. This, along with many other reasons, is why VPNs are becoming a less safe method for infrastructure access in enterprises.

Why it matters: Modern approaches to human access should be using just-in-time workflows, granting temporary access when needed and automatically revoking it after a time limit is reached. This eliminates the risk of dangling permissions, reducing insider threat vectors and satisfying even the strictest compliance standards.

»8. Are we protecting sensitive data throughout its lifecycle?

Data doesn’t stay at rest. It moves, it flows, it gets copied, processed, stored, and shared. And every step in that journey is a potential risk.

A good encryption strategy protects data not just when it's sitting in storage, but when it's being accessed, transferred, or analyzed. A good encryption strategy also requires visibility: knowing where your data is, who is using it, and how it's being protected.

Lastly, encryption should be a self-service task for developers, once the platform team has established a solid system that runs the self-service workflows. Developers should not be creating their own bespoke encryption for applications, and instead should follow an organizational standard set by the security team and offered as a service by the platform team.

Why it matters: Protecting data is about more than compliance — it's how you maintain customer trust, protect intellectual property, and defend your brand's integrity. Enterprise-grade controls should encrypt data in motion and at rest, manage encryption keys automatically, and secure every access point from API to storage.

»9. Is our compliance posture audit-ready at all times?

Audit season doesn't have to mean war rooms and last-minute log hunts. For many enterprises, proving compliance is reactive, labor-intensive, and full of gaps. But it doesn't have to be. Adobe went from taking two weeks to compile audits, to just two days.

This question comes back to having a single system of record for infrastructure and security workflows. This means consolidating toolsets and choosing tools that integrate well with a wide variety of products.

Why it matters: When security and compliance data is continuously captured, monitored, and logged, everything you need is already in place when auditors show up. This isn't just about passing audits — it's about the high cost of long audit processes and the even higher costs of failed audits or breaches.

»10. Can we manage and enforce security consistently across clouds?

Cloud sprawl isn't just an IT problem — it's a business risk. Every new account, region, or team operating without a shared governance model increases the chances of misalignment, misconfiguration, and missed threats.

That fragmentation leads to more than just security gaps. It creates operational drag, audit headaches, and higher cloud costs.

Why it matters: Unified infrastructure and security lifecycle management provides consistent policy enforcement, access control, and automation across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hybrid environments. When your security model works the same way everywhere, your teams move faster, your risk goes down, and your business scales with confidence.

»The next generation of cloud security

Security isn't the end goal — it's the enabler of resilience, trusted operations, and sustainable innovation. It's a lifecycle; an ongoing adaptive process of securing your people, data, and systems. It's not a point-in-time fix.

Businesses need modern, enterprise-grade tools to manage infrastructure and security across teams, clouds, and workloads at scale. The goal is to innovate confidently with built-in security, automation, and governance tailored for complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Let's do cloud right. Let's secure what matters. And let's build a foundation that accelerates your business securely, confidently, and at scale.

Read more about modern cloud security here: The next generation of cloud security: Unified risk management, compliance, and zero trust