Why You Must Audit Your Cloud Before Trusting It
The war room screens blinked red at 2:17 a.m.
Customer data was streaming out of a cloud CRM in real time. An integration to a marketing tool hadn’t been reviewed in a year. The attackers didn’t need to “hack” anything and they simply walked through the side door with stolen credentials. By sunrise, the company was talking to lawyers, not customers.
I’ve seen this before. The details change, the pattern doesn’t: a rush to the cloud, faith in “secure by default,” and gaps no one checks until it’s too late. In the cloud, your perimeter isn’t your firewall it’s your identities, API keys, and vendor connections.
When the Cloud Gets Breached
Big budgets don’t mean immunity. In 2024, misconfigured Snowflake accounts let attackers hit over 160 customers, including AT&T and Ticketmaster. In 2025, ShinyHunters phished Salesforce users, even breaching Google themselves in the process, into installing a fake data loader that siphoned live records. Allianz Life lost 1.4 million customer records when a third-party cloud CRM was compromised. And a 16-billion-credential dump from infostealer logs sat exposed in cloud storage for anyone to take.
Why It Keeps Happening
Attack surfaces have exploded. Social engineering bypasses technical controls. Misconfigurations still leak data every day. Vendor breaches spread quickly. And stolen credentials are endlessly recycled.
Before You Commit to the Cloud
Know exactly what you’re protecting and design your architecture around the sensitivity of your data, not hype. Have an exit plan if your provider fails and test it. Backups should live in a completely separate environment. Ideally a different account, region, or even a different provider so a breach of production doesn’t touch them. Encrypt them in transit and at rest with keys you control, rotate those keys, and log every access. Where possible, make backups immutable so they can’t be altered or deleted for a fixed retention period, and consider keeping a copy entirely offline for critical data.
Cost as an Attack Vector
In the cloud, cost control is part of security. Attackers can spin up massive compute workloads, trigger huge amounts of data transfer, or run cryptomining operations to drive your bill through the roof a tactic known as denial-of-wallet.
Enable cost monitoring and set budget alerts. I would absolutely advise that you investigate any unexpected usage spikes immediately. A sudden bill increase might be your first sign of an active attack. Some of the more recent cybersecurity attacks hitting the news have revealed that bad actors had accessed systems many months prior to revealing themselves and taking control for ransom. This was the case in both the Marks and Spencer breach and the breach of the Co-Op.
Test your defences before go-live. Lock down access with MFA for every account, keep privileges minimal, and protect high-risk accounts with hardware keys and alerts. Classify your data, control your encryption keys, and avoid “public by accident” exposure by setting hard guardrails. Turn on and centralise logs, and monitor for configuration drift. Train staff to spot phishing, vishing, fake prompts, and unexpected login requests. Challenge your vendors to prove their security, not just claim it.
Using Cloud Networking to Tighten Security
Not all cloud platforms are created equal — and the right cloud-managed network can actually reduce your attack surface if configured well. Platforms such as Ubiquiti UniFi and Zyxel Nebula bring security controls closer to the edge of your network and centralise visibility, so you’re not chasing logs across dozens of disjointed systems.
Both systems allow you to enforce strong access policies across all connected devices, from remote branch routers to wireless access points, without relying on local administrators to keep settings aligned. Zyxel Nebula’s cloud-based security service integrates firewalling, intrusion prevention, and DNS threat filtering directly into the network fabric. This means malware, command-and-control callbacks, and phishing domains can be blocked before they ever reach a user’s browser.
Ubiquiti’s UniFi platform offers centralised client monitoring and VLAN isolation, enabling you to segment IoT devices, guest traffic, and internal workloads into separate, locked-down zones. If an attacker compromises one device, microsegmentation prevents them from moving laterally to your crown-jewel systems.
Both Nebula and UniFi support multi-factor authentication for administrator access and can alert you in real time when new devices join the network or when unusual traffic patterns appear — key early-warning signs in modern breaches. Because configurations are stored and managed centrally, rolling out a change or closing a newly discovered vulnerability can be done instantly across your entire fleet, rather than site by site.
Used well, these platforms turn your network into an active security control rather than a passive conduit — shrinking the number of “side doors” an attacker can slip through and giving you the speed to respond before small incidents become 2:17 a.m. war rooms.
Closing Thought
All of this may sound like common sense and it is. But let’s not forget: the cloud isn’t unsafe assuming it’s safe is. Verify, then verify again. Build for failure, plan for containment, and keep cost awareness in your security strategy. The worst time to discover the truth is in a 2:17 a.m. war room, with a breach in progress and your bill climbing by the minute, realising you believed the hype.