What Is Cloud Infrastructure Security?

Cloud infrastructure security is the discipline of protecting the core resources — compute, storage, networking, identity, management — that keep your cloud environment running. It covers aspects of your company's servers, networks, access controls, and the tools you use to manage it all. It’s the security foundation your applications and data depend on every day.

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Securing that infrastructure is a shared job split between two parties. There’s your cloud provider, such as major players like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, which takes ownership of securing the infrastructure itself, like the data centers and network backbone. On the other side are you and your team, who secure what you put into the cloud: identities, configurations, and the workloads you deploy.

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Infrastructure and networking is a core domain (Domain 7) of research guidance from the Cloud Security Alliance. It covers areas like Software Defined Networks (SDN), Zero Trust Architectures (ZTA), and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), among other cloud resources. Not only does it recommend implementing secure architectures as foundational, but the CSA guidance also emphasizes integrating cloud security early in the software development lifecycle and maintaining hyper-vigilant security monitoring.

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When implemented effectively, it blocks the most common cloud attacks and shrinks the attack surface that threat actors exploit. In cases where something slips through the cracks, cloud infrastructure security pulls the levers to contain the damage and keeps your critical systems online through the chaos.

What Does Cloud Infrastructure Include?

Cloud infrastructure breaks down into five layers, and each one needs its own dedicated security measures. These measures can span a wide variety of tools and technologies. Here's what each one entails at a glance.

Compute

As the heavy-lifting side of your cloud infrastructure, compute resources run the workloads your business depends on. The complexity of computational resources has expanded from a few virtual machines to organizations now stitching together several compute models at once. A typical compute environment may include:

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• Virtual machines run persistent workloads
• Containers package applications for fast deployment
• Kubernetes clusters orchestrate containers at scale
• Serverless functions run your code while the platform handles the underlying servers

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A recent survey revealed that 28% of organizations already run most of their applications on Kubernetes (an open-source system for automating the management of containerized apps), and significantly more plan to adopt this platform within five years.

Storage and Databases

Depending on how your applications use your data, the storage that supports it can take many forms. For instance, unstructured data like files, backups, and media goes into object storage, while performance-sensitive workloads use block storage. The different types of cloud-based storage and databases include:

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• Object storage for files, backups, and media
• Block storage for databases and performance-sensitive applications
• File storage for shared access across teams and systems
• Database services, both relational and non-relational, holding your core business data

Networking

The networking layer enables communication among all layers within your cloud environment. This layer also dictates how traffic flows between your workloads and the outside world. Misconfiguration occurs often here. As such, security teams need to consider the full scope of networking technologies, like:

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• Virtual networks and subnets segment your environment
• Gateways connect your cloud to on-premises systems or other clouds
• Load balancers distribute traffic across your resources
• Firewalls and traffic flow controls filter what gets through

Identity

This layer encompasses every user and system interacting with your cloud environment. Identity has become incredibly complex as machine identities outnumber humans. According to the CSA, the average ratio of human to non-human identities is 45:1. However, in fully cloud-native environments, this ratio grows to an estimated 144:1, making identity security an uphill battle for security teams. The full scope of roles in this realm includes:

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• Human users with unique accounts and permissions
• Service accounts let applications communicate with each other
• Roles and permissions define what each identity can touch
• Credentials and machine identities tied to automated processes and workloads

Management Systems

These are the management tools used to configure, monitor, and modify all previous layers. These tools are among the most valuable targets in your environment. Once compromised, they hand attackers broad rights across everything you run. The tools in this layer include:

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• Cloud consoles provide centralized administrative access
• APIs automate configuration and integration across services
• Configuration tools enforce your security and compliance policies
• Logs and monitoring services track activity and flag anomalies

Why Is Cloud Infrastructure Security Important?

Your cloud environment carries a substantial security burden, holding all of the apps, workloads, and data your business needs to function every day. The stakes are higher than what most security teams anticipate, and the responsibility to keep everything protected is just as much an internal effort as it is an outsourced investment.

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Organizations often slip up in the pursuit of fast deployment cycles, through configuration drift, or by neglecting sprawling multicloud setups. All of these oversights open vulnerabilities along the way, and attackers only need to exploit one to get in. IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report revealed that cloud misconfiguration is responsible for 15% of all data breaches, ranking it on the same level as phishing attacks as a leading attack vector.

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One compromised identity or workload can hand an attacker a path into everything connected to it, turning a small incident into a sprawling one fast. That's why cloud infrastructure security connects directly to other critical aspects of business continuity, regulatory compliance, and cyber resilience across your organization.

How Does Cloud Infrastructure Security Work?

Strong cloud infrastructure security is built on a continuous loop that runs 24/7. Below is a brief breakdown of how it works.

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• Identify all cloud resources, identities, configurations, dependencies, and communication flows within your environment.
• Determine whether there are any known vulnerabilities, misconfigured elements, overly permissive access, or unsecured services.
• Use layers of security to protect identities, workloads, data, networks, and management interfaces.
• Continuously monitor cloud activities and workload behaviors to detect early warning indicators of possible breaches.
• Contain threats quickly, remediate weaknesses, and restore service functionality.

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The shared responsibility model exists under each stage of this cycle. The provider is responsible for securing the physical facility, hardware, network, and basic underlying services supporting your cloud. Your responsibility includes securing your data, identities, configurations, applications, and workloads deployed upon those cloud services.

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This split shifts with the deployment model; your responsibility is greatest with IaaS and narrows as you move toward PaaS, SaaS, and serverless. Be aware of how much control you have over each provider's offerings, since making incorrect assumptions about these providers may lead to gaps.

What Are the Biggest Cloud Infrastructure Security Risks?

Your cloud environment faces a multitude of threats from various directions, and most incidents can be traced back to a handful of common vulnerabilities. Here's where the security risks most often reside.

Misconfigurations and Exposed Resources

Cloud infrastructure misconfiguration is one of the most frequently reported ways attackers gain entry into your system. It's also one of the greatest concerns facing companies today because attackers perform such a high volume of scans to find it. Common examples include public storage buckets, open network ports, insecure network policies, and disabled logging. Most misconfigurations stem from human oversight rather than software vulnerabilities.

Identity and Access Risks

Identity has become the main battleground in cloud security because it gives attackers the fastest route to your data. They exploit stolen credentials, excessive permissions, weak authentication, and privilege escalation. In fact, Verizon's latest Data Breach Investigations Report found that stolen credentials contributed to 22% of the breaches its researchers analyzed. Unsecured service accounts, such as over-privileged automation and CI/CD accounts, introduce another layer of risk, since they often have broad access and draw far less scrutiny than human users.

Vulnerabilities and Workload Compromise

Each workload running in your cloud introduces some level of risk. Common weaknesses include unpatched systems, unvalidated container images, poorly secured APIs, and injected malicious code that lets an attacker establish a foothold. When an attacker compromises a workload, it becomes a springboard for further exploitation across your cloud.

Data Exposure and Exfiltration

In most cases, your data is the real target behind every risk described above. Poor encryption practices, overly lenient access control, or weak segmentation between environments may leave your sensitive information accessible to an attacker who gains entry. A single misplaced permission on a database or storage bucket can easily convert a minor incursion into a massive exfiltration event.

Lateral Movement

Lateral movement refers to when an attacker uses one compromised resource as a stepping stone to reach connected workloads, applications, identities, or data across your cloud infrastructure. Based on our research, we estimate nearly 90% of companies experienced some type of lateral movement in the last year. Zero Trust Segmentation is designed to contain lateral movement before it spreads.

What Are the Key Components of Cloud Infrastructure Security?

Cloud infrastructure security spans a set of coordinated components working together across every layer you manage.

Identity and Access Management

Identity is the gateway to everything you run in the cloud. Strong identity and access management verifies every user and service before granting entry, then enforces least-privilege permissions once inside. Multi-factor authentication, role-based access, and regular permission reviews all fall under this component. MFA reduces the odds of compromise in the first place, while role-based access and permission reviews shrink the blast radius when an account is compromised.

Cloud Workload Protection

Workloads need defenses tuned to the myriad risks they face while running. Workload protection defends virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless functions against vulnerabilities and runtime threats. This includes pre-deployment image scanning, monitoring running processes for anomalous behavior, and patching identified vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.

Network Security and Segmentation

Network security controls govern north-south traffic (entering and exiting your cloud) and east-west traffic (between resources inside your cloud), and isolate high-risk systems to only the pathways they need. As stated in IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report, companies with mature Zero Trust architectures experience an average savings of $1.76 million per breach compared with companies in the initial stages of implementing such solutions.

Data Protection

Data protection secures the data itself, rather than just the systems it resides on. This begins with identifying sensitive data to understand what will require additional protections. Once you’ve identified the data you deem sensitive, apply the fundamentals: encryption, restrictive access controls, and reliable backup and restore processes. When every other control fails, reliable backups are often the only thing standing between a single incident and a catastrophic one.

Monitoring and Detection

To effectively monitor your environment and detect potential compromises, you need complete visibility across your entire environment. Cloud environments generate an enormous volume of activity, and most of it is noise you need to filter out. 

The quicker you can detect threats that enter your network, the faster your teams can isolate them and minimize their impact. Your security measures need to track and identify configuration changes, suspicious behaviors, or active attacks as they occur. That depends on aggregating log events and telemetry across your environment, then analyzing them for meaningful signals. 

How Does Cloud Infrastructure Security Differ Across Cloud Environments?

Your security priorities will depend on the type of cloud solution you are using, because each model gives you a different level of control and a different share of the responsibility.

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• Public cloud: You are responsible for managing configurations, identities, workloads, data, and network controls in a public cloud environment, but those network controls can only be layered on top of the provider’s infrastructure.
• Private cloud: You are generally responsible for most of the pieces listed above, plus the physical resources behind your environment and any virtualization and networking layers.
• Hybrid cloud: You need consistent visibility across both your on-premises systems and your cloud environments. You also need unified security policies that cover both areas.
• Multicloud: On top of the unified policy requirements above, multicloud requires normalizing monitoring and controls across providers that offer different services, configurations, and security models.

Cloud Infrastructure Security vs. Cloud Security vs. Cloud-Native Security

These terms have related meanings, but each one covers different ground. Cloud security is the umbrella that represents all aspects of an organization’s applications, data, infrastructure, identities, and services. Cloud infrastructure security zooms in on the foundational layer beneath everything else, while cloud-native security targets the modern architectures built on top of it. The table below defines the focus and scope of these initiatives.

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Cloud-native security and cloud infrastructure security overlap around workload security, identity, network controls, configuration management, and monitoring. As such, cloud infrastructure security is a key component in both a broader cloud-security posture and any cloud-native model.

What Tools Support Cloud Infrastructure Security?

While no single tool can do everything to protect cloud infrastructure, many organizations use multiple solutions to create a more comprehensive approach across these areas.

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• CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) identifies potential misconfigurations, exposed resources, or compliance issues within your organization's environment before malicious actors do.
• CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platform) protects against vulnerability exploitation and runtime attacks for virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions.
• CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) and IAM (Identity and Access Management) manage identity, authorization, and entitlements for cloud resources to ensure access is granted based on legitimate need.
• SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and cloud detection tools provide a single-pane view of your organization's activity and telemetry, which can help identify abnormal or potentially malicious activities quickly.
• Microsegmentation controls communication between workloads and limits an attacker’s movement once they’ve established a foothold.

How Does Zero Trust Strengthen Cloud Infrastructure Security?

The Zero Trust approach inverts the typical security paradigm by assuming all identities (human and non-human) are untrusted until they are verified. Instead of trusting user activity or resource usage based on a device's position within the network, Zero Trust continuously verifies each identity before allowing access. Verified access for each identity is limited to the resources required to complete a specific task, while also tracking communication and interdependencies across multicloud and hybrid environments.

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Microsegmentation puts the Zero Trust principle into practice, drawing boundaries that block unauthorized communication. As a result, this reduces an attacker's ability to move laterally and traverse a network once an initial entry point is identified. According to industry statistics, organizations employing a Zero Trust security strategy report reductions in lateral movement of up to 80% during an ongoing attack.

How Illumio Supports Cloud Infrastructure Security

At Illumio, we built our platform around one primary focus, and that's stopping breaches from spreading once they start. Across hybrid and multicloud infrastructure, we map workloads, dependencies, and communication paths to show how everything actually connects. From there, we help establish least-privilege segmentation policies for cloud workloads and other critical resources, isolating sensitive applications, databases, and operational environments from traffic outside their actual needs.

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In addition to providing network segmentation solutions, our platform continuously monitors communications across your network. When suspicious activity is identified, it flags the potential attack path and alerts administrators so they can act before the threat spreads. Should an attacker still find a way into your environment and compromise one or more of your workloads, our platform allows administrators to isolate the compromised workloads immediately and quickly limit the damage caused by the breach. 

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Independent analysts have named Illumio one of the strongest dedicated microsegmentation platforms for enterprises serious about containing ransomware threats. Learn more about Illumio and how it serves as a powerful breach containment platform.

FAQs

What is cloud infrastructure security in simple terms?

Cloud infrastructure security focuses on protecting the servers, networks, and access controls that keep your cloud environment running. It's the foundational security your applications depend on.

What are examples of cloud infrastructure security?

Common examples include encrypting stored data, enforcing least-privilege access for cloud identities, segmenting workloads from each other, and monitoring configurations for drift or exposure.

Who is responsible for cloud infrastructure security?

You and your cloud provider share responsibility for securing your cloud environment. Your provider secures the physical environment, including data centers and hardware. You’re responsible for the identities, configurations, and workloads you run on top of it.

What are the benefits of cloud infrastructure security?

Strong cloud infrastructure security reduces your exposure to attackers, helps you meet regulatory requirements, and keeps critical systems running through an incident. It also limits how far a breach can spread once it starts.

How does microsegmentation protect cloud infrastructure?

Microsegmentation breaks your environment into smaller zones and restricts communication between them. Network segmentation at this level limits an attacker's ability to move laterally, containing a breach as close as possible to where it began.

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