Cloud security is becoming a big priority for organizations, especially for those who shift to multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Cloud’s shared responsibility model gives flexibility and scalability, but that also means it introduces new gaps and vulnerabilities. In this guide, we’ll take a look at the top cloud security best practices organizations can follow to keep up and explain them.
What are cloud security best practices?
Cloud security best practices encompasses taking the necessary measures to monitor and secure cloud environments. It involves knowing how the cloud works (including having awareness about its shared responsibility model), monitoring for misconfigurations, and creating incident response, recovery, and backup plans for organizations. Practices are not just limited to security measures. They can also include choosing the right solutions, setting the right policies, and addressing security silos.
These practices also take a look at how cloud workloads are deployed, how organizations draft and implement their security blueprints, laying down compliance and privacy guidelines, and so much more. It’s multiple elements, settings, workflows, and users working together to establish strong controls, logging and monitoring measures, and covering various other aspects.
Why Are Cloud Security Best Practices Important?
Accenture reports that migrating to the cloud allows businesses to eliminate these costs, leading to IT total cost of ownership savings of 30% to 40%. This implies that a mid-sized enterprise that previously spent $100,000 annually on hardware, maintenance, and security could see the cost reduced by up to 40% after migrating to cloud security solutions. The reduction comes from eliminating the need for physical infrastructure and transferring responsibility for updates and monitoring to the cloud provider. A report from OpsRamp revealed that 94% of companies saw lower upfront costs after adopting cloud solutions, enabling them to allocate resources more efficiently.
Following the best practices for cloud security is important because it tells you if your organization is on the right track. Poor security can impact account and data integrity. It can ruin your business reputation and cause loss of customers’ trust. The cloud is growing by the day and with access to high-compute services and more processing power, the risk of getting hijacked also increases. Just because you rely on a cloud service provider doesn’t inherently make them safe. Most cloud vendors don’t factor security by design. Cloud storage solutions can be accessed at any time and data in transit can be intercepted or eavesdropped upon.
Cloud Security Challenges
Here are the main cloud security challenges faced by enterprises:
- Attack surfaces are expanding and it’s a no-brainer. More technologies = more tools = more workflows = more opportunities for attackers to hijack any surface or asset that interacts with them.
- Cloud compliance is becoming more nuanced. Information security risks are popping up. Sometimes the benchmarks you follow don’t align with industry standards and it can lead to lawsuits and other legal issues. Shared infrastructure vulnerabilities are also becoming apparent; like, shared configurations and resources can expose tenants to data leaks.
- Shadow IT practices are another natural byproduct of agile ecosystems. Some employees can use unauthorized files and software in order to be more efficient and collaborate with colleagues. The downside is that the organization can face hefty regulatory fines and lose client rust.
- Human error is another challenge and one of the biggest reasons behind cloud security failures. Some users don’t know when they are interacting or engaging with adversaries. Uneducated cloud users can accidentally give away sensitive information during online exchanges. They can also make mistakes in configuring cloud resources and during collaborations. Human error is not limited to data transmission.
25 Cloud Security Best Practices
Now let’s take a look at the top cloud security best practices for enterprises in 2025. These will make up your cloud security best practices.
1. Understand the Shared Responsibility Model
Understand who has access to what and who is responsible for managing what kinds of resources and services. Since security is a shared responsibility, the providers take care of the cloud infrastructure while users are responsible for securing their apps, data, and access controls hosted on them.
2. Educate Your Employees and Build Strong Cloud Security Awareness
Building a strong awareness about cloud security strategy, its roles, and learning about your provider’s specific responsibilities, is one of the first steps to take when it comes to mastering cloud security best practices. Be sure to regularly review your shared responsibility documentation and align your cloud security best practices with their necessary security guidelines as well.
Educate your users on the top cloud security best practices. Teach them about emerging threats, what to watch out for, and how to use the right tools, technologies, and workflows to eradicate them. You should focus on minimizing human errors and your training will include modules on safe browsing practices, protecting against phishing and ransomware attacks, secure password management, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA), and more.
3. Ensure Regular Patching and Updates
Ensuring that your enterprise is up-to-date and not behind on security is one of the top priorities for your organization. You need to apply patches timely and make sure you implement the right ones. This will help your organizations quickly address vulnerabilities. There are many centralized, cloud-based patch management tools you can use for this. They even schedule updates and give you reminders.
4. Use Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Tools
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools can help you monitor and prevent potential data breaches. They control data transfer, sharing limits, and usage. These solutions can prevent unauthorized access and secure knowledge. You can protect yourself against accidental or sensitive data exposure. For example, DLP solutions can protect your intellectual property, financial data, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
5. Work on Incident Response Planning
Make an incident response plan because your company will need it. Sometimes disasters are just waiting to happen or a breach occurs and it escalates. Your IR team can coordinate detection, containment, and recovery from cyber attacks and other security incidents. Your incident response strategy should also outline the steps to be taken to recover and restore or rollback malicious changes.
6. Enforce Principle of Least Privilege Access
Follow the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) access and enforce it. It will pave the path towards building a zero trust security architecture. You can prevent insider threats that way and make it much more challenging to hijack accounts or leak sensitive data. Remove access rights for individuals you don’t know, review your machine identities, and assign roles only based on job requirements or specifications.
7. Implement CNAPP and WAF
Use Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) solutions throughout development to production. They can provide AI-powered runtime protection, agentless vulnerability management, and help with compliance monitoring and cloud workload security. CNAPP provides holistic security and deep visibility into your cloud environments. If you are working with multi-cloud and hybrid environments, you can enhance your cloud security stance and secure your containers, VMs, serverless functions, and microservices.
Deploy Cloud Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) as they will help you monitor HTTP traffic coming and moving between the internet and web apps. They can help protect against web-based attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, and SQL injection.
8. Use SIEM and the Best SDLC Practices
You should also use Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems to get help with logging and analytics. They can correlate and analyze events in real-time, plus you can aggregate and correlate log data from multiple sources. You can get unique insights about patterns of malicious behaviours, identify the chances of a next data breach, and create automated incident response procedures. If your security team works with an SOC, then a SIEM solution will improve the coordination between them.
You should also use secure Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) practices. Focus on code-to-cloud security and integrate security for every phrase of your CI/CD or development pipeline. SDLC cloud security best practices will also include detecting vulnerabilities early on during development, reducing the risk of security flaws, and incorporating real-time or automated testing. You also need to do security reviews and compliance audits to ensure that your applications are safe by design.
9. Draft a Vendor Risk Management Program
Make a vendor risk management program because third-party vendors may pose a risk to your organizations. If you’re working with outsourced vendors, business partners, IT suppliers, or use any other external cloud services, then you need to exercise due diligence before blindly relying on them. You should assess your vendor’s cloud security best practices, compliance policies, and conduct risk assessment questionnaires to assess and investigate them.
10. Use IAM Solutions and Improve Encryption
Use identity and access management (IAM) solutions to improve your access security. You should monitor and update IAM policies regularly. Apply role-based access controls (RBAC) with conditional access to tighten security and restrict access to resources for trusted devices, networks, and users only.
Encrypt data in-transit and at- rest. It involves selecting the right encryption protocols, ensuring proper key management, and aligning encryption policies with compliance standards. For data at rest, encryption tools like AWS KMS or Azure Disk Encryption can be used to protect stored information. Data in transit should be protected using strong protocols such as TLS 1.3, but also consider IPsec and SSH tunneling for secure communication in cloud environments. It’s also critical to enforce regular encryption key rotations and protect those keys with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs).
11. Incorporate CASB and SAST/DAST Solutions
Use CASBs who offer varying capabilities, typically divided into API-based CASBs and proxy-based CASBs. API-based CASBs integrate directly with cloud services, allowing seamless monitoring of user behavior and app configurations without interrupting traffic. Proxy-based CASBs, on the other hand, provide real-time control by routing traffic through a proxy, ideal for dynamic threat response. Key features to look for include data loss prevention (DLP), shadow IT discovery, anomaly detection, and compliance monitoring.
Use SAST/DAST tools to scan IaC templates for vulnerabilities. Apply parameterization to avoid hardcoding secrets and integrate environment segmentation to limit cross-environment risk. Use tools like AWS Secrets Manager to securely manage sensitive information and enforce the least privilege on all resource definitions, limiting unnecessary access.
12. Use Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and Network Security Groups (NSGs)
Use virtual private clouds (VPCs) and network security groups (NSGs) to create isolated environments for different services. Configure subnets to further segment resources and apply access control lists (ACLs) to regulate traffic flow. Implement security groups to enforce strict controls between these zones and ensure that inter-zone communication is closely monitored and limited to what is necessary for business operations.
13. Do Vulnerability Scans
Use vulnerability scanning tools to continuously assess your cloud infrastructure. Schedule penetration tests with certified professionals to identify potential attack vectors. After discovering vulnerabilities, follow up with prompt remediation, ensuring that patches and fixes are deployed quickly to reduce your attack surface. Additionally, CVE databases should be used to prioritize vulnerabilities based on severity.
14. Implement a Cloud Governance Framework
Create a governance framework using industry standards like NIST CSF or ISO 27001 to establish clear security policies. Document compliance requirements for data protection and cloud usage. Conduct regular risk assessments to identify gaps and integrate cloud security monitoring tools to track adherence to policies. Include detailed documentation on roles, responsibilities, and escalation procedures.
15. Get Insights by Generating Threat Intelligence
Use global cloud threat intelligence you can rely on and stay informed about upcoming threats. Address blind spots and security gaps in your current infrastructure before they get worse. You should also use endpoint protection solutions to secure your network perimeters. XDR solutions can be used to extend endpoint defenses and provide more security coverage.
Secure Your Organization With SentinelOne’s Cloud Security Solution
SentinelOne offers various cloud security solutions that can help you implement these cloud security best practices. It understands that organizations have changing security requirements which is why it constantly adapts and evolves to mitigate emerging threats.
Singularity™ Cloud Security from SentinelOne is the most comprehensive and integrated CNAPP solution available in the market. It delivers SaaS security posture management and includes features like a graph-based asset inventory, shift-left security testing, CI/CD pipeline integration, container and Kubernetes security posture management, and more. SentinelOne can tighten permissions for cloud apps and prevent secrets leakage. It can configure checks on AI services, discover AI pipelines and models, and provides protection that goes beyond CSPM. You can do application penetration testing automatically, identify exploit paths, and get real-time AI-powered runtime protection. SentinelOne protects public, private, on-prem, and hybrid cloud and IT environments.
SentinelOne’s CNAPP can manage cloud entitlements. It can tighten permissions and prevent secrets leakage. You can detect up to 750+ different types of secrets. Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) provides full forensic telemetry. You also get incident response from experts and it comes with a pre-built and customizable detection library. SentinelOne’s agentless CNAPP provides various security features such as Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), External Attack and Surface Management (EASM), Secrets Scanning, IaC Scanning, SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM), and more. It can ensure compliance for up to more than 30 frameworks like CIS, SOC2, NIST, ISO27K, MITRE, and others.
SentinelOne’s Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) supports agentless deployment in minutes. You can easily assess compliance and eliminate misconfigurations. If your goal is to build a zero trust security architecture and enforce the principle of least privilege access across all cloud accounts, then SentinelOne can help you do that.
SentinelOne’s Offensive Security Engine™ can uncover and remediate vulnerabilities before attackers strike. Its Verified Exploit Paths™ and advanced attack simulations help identify hidden risks across cloud environments—going far beyond traditional detection. Multiple AI-powered detection engines work together to provide machine-speed protection against runtime attacks. SentinelOne provides autonomous threat protection at scale and does holistic root cause and blast radius analysis of affected cloud workloads, infrastructure, and data stores.
SentinelOne Singularity™ Cloud Workload Security helps you prevent ransomware, zero-days, and other runtime threats in real time. It can protect critical cloud workloads including VMs, containers, and CaaS with AI-powered detection and automated response. You can root out threats, supercharge investigation, do threat hunting, and empower analysts with workload telemetry. You can run AI-assisted natural language queries on a unified data lake. SentinelOne CWPP supports containers, Kubernetes, virtual machines, physical servers, and serverless.
SentinelOne can implement the best DevSecOps practices for your organization and can enforce shift-left security testing. You can do agentless vulnerability scanning and use its 1,000+ out-of-the-box and custom rules. SentinelOne also solves issues related to cloud repositories, container registries, images, and IaC templates. Purple AI™ is your gen AI security analyst that is included with SentinelOne’s agentless CNAPP. It provides contextual summaries of alerts, suggested next steps and the option to seamlessly start an in-depth investigation aided by the power of generative and agentic AI – all documented in one investigation notebook.
SentinelOne’s AI-SIEM solution is designed for the autonomous SOC. Singularity™ AI-SIEM is built on the Singularity™ Data Lake and it can help you move into a cloud-native AI SIEM. You can filter, enrich, and optimize the data in your legacy SIEM. It ingests all excess data, keeps current workflows, and augments and integrates SentinelOne into your SOC. You can speed up your workflows with Hyperautomation and it can grant greater visibility into your investigations and detections with the industry’s only unified console experience. SentinelOne also offers both EDR and XDR solutions as well to provide comprehensive security coverage for enterprises.
Conclusion
Cloud security best practices are now becoming essential for every organization. They aren’t just some optional measures you take. They are an ongoing process. New threats will emerge and these best practices will help you constantly adapt and mitigate threats. Whether it is securing data through encryption, managing access with strict controls, or continuously monitoring for vulnerabilities, each step contributes to a stronger, more resilient cloud infrastructure. Contact SentinelOne for assistance today.
FAQs
Which of the following is considered a cloud security best practice?
Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a widely recognized cloud security best practice to enhance access control and prevent unauthorized access.
What are the five key elements of a strong cloud security strategy?
The five key elements include identity and access management (IAM), data encryption, regular security assessments, continuous monitoring, and incident response planning.
What are the top 5 security practices in cloud computing?
Top security practices in cloud computing include encryption, identity and access management (IAM), network security, threat detection, and compliance management.
What are 3 measures used to protect the cloud?
The three key measures are data encryption, implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA), and regular vulnerability assessments.
How can organizations ensure data encryption in the cloud?
You need to encrypt data at rest and in transit using AES-256 standards. Organizations should use customer-managed encryption keys through AWS KMS or Azure Key Vault instead of default provider keys. They will need proper key rotation and backup processes. Make sure you classify your data first – sensitive information gets stronger encryption. If you lose control of your keys, your data becomes unrecoverable, so store them separately from encrypted data.
How does automation help enforce cloud security best practices?
Automation applies security configurations consistently across all cloud resources without human error. It will continuously monitor your environment for misconfigurations and automatically fix them before they become problems. You can set up automated compliance checks that flag violations in real-time. They should handle routine tasks like vulnerability scanning and patch management that security teams can’t manage manually at scale. This prevents configuration drift.
How can DevSecOps improve cloud security posture?
DevSecOps integrates security testing directly into your development pipeline so vulnerabilities get caught during coding, not after deployment. Developers will identify security flaws early, which costs less than fixing them in production. You should implement automated security scans in CI/CD pipelines that check for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations before code goes live. This creates shared responsibility for security across development and operations teams.
Should small businesses adopt the same cloud security practices as enterprises?
Small businesses need similar core practices but can use simplified versions. You don’t need enterprise infrastructure, but you still need multi-factor authentication, data encryption, and regular backups. They will benefit from managed security services that provide enterprise-level protection without dedicated security staff. You should focus on fundamentals first – strong passwords, MFA, and employee training. Small businesses face the same threats, so you can’t skip basic security.
What tools help enforce best practices?
You can use Cloud Security Posture Management tools like AWS Config or Azure Security Center that monitor configurations against security benchmarks. Identity and Access Management systems will enforce least-privilege access and multi-factor authentication automatically. They should deploy SIEM tools for real-time monitoring and incident response. Key Management Systems automate encryption key rotation and backup. These tools create automated guardrails that prevent misconfigurations and detect threats.