Moving software to the cloud unlocks a lot of benefits. It enables the application to scale in ways that aren’t possible with on-premise infrastructure. What’s more, renting time in a data center that someone else sets up is a lot cheaper than building your own data center. Want to set up some servers that are closer to customers on another continent? The cloud’s got you covered.
Many organizations worry about application security when moving to the cloud. The truth is, cloud application security is no different from any other kind of application security. The way that you secure applications—in the cloud, and on-premise—is by understanding your threats and how to mitigate them.
There are many things that are easier to secure on the cloud. In this post, we’ll talk about the most common security decisions teams make to secure cloud applications. By themselves, they won’t make your application secure. But they will give you a pretty good start.
Cloud Application Security FAQs
Cloud Application Security focuses on protecting software and data hosted in cloud environments from threats like data breaches, unauthorized access, and malicious activity. It covers securing app components, APIs, user access, and data flows to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability across cloud-delivered services.
Start by enforcing strong authentication and access controls, including multi-factor authentication. Use encryption for data both at rest and in transit. Regularly scan for vulnerabilities and patch promptly.
Monitor app behavior and logs to spot anomalies. Also, train users to avoid phishing and social engineering, and implement secure development lifecycles with regular code reviews.
Common issues include misconfigured access permissions, insecure APIs, weak identity management, data leakage from unencrypted storage, and outdated software components. Injection flaws, broken authentication, and insufficient logging also put cloud apps at risk, alongside insider threats and compromised credentials.
Cloud Security protects the overall cloud infrastructure—networks, compute, storage, and configurations—while Application Security specifically targets software vulnerabilities and risks at the code and runtime level.
Application security focuses on preventing flaws inside apps that attackers can exploit, whereas cloud security ensures the environment hosting those apps is safely managed.
There are Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) tools, API security gateways, and vulnerability scanners tailored for cloud apps. Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) monitor SaaS apps. Developers use Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing (SAST/DAST) in CI/CD pipelines to catch issues early.
Examples include using AWS WAF to block malicious traffic to a website, Azure’s Key Vault for managing encryption keys, Cloudflare’s API protection to prevent abuse, and implementing OAuth for secure identity management in cloud apps. Continuous security monitoring with logging and alerting also helps detect threats.
Top threats include account takeover, insecure APIs, cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injections, misconfigured permissions exposing data, ransomware targeting app workloads, and supply chain attacks through compromised third-party dependencies. Social engineering and insider abuse also remain significant risks.