Cloud Penetration Testing: Securing AWS, Azure, and GCP

This guide provides everything you need to understand, scope, and execute this type of testing—with practical guidance you can act on immediately.

The Shared Responsibility Model

Cloud providers secure the platform. You secure everything you build on it. That distinction—the shared responsibility model—is where the vast majority of cloud breaches originate. Not from flaws in AWS or Azure's infrastructure, but from misconfigurations in how customers use those services. Overpermissive IAM roles, publicly accessible storage buckets, insecure service-to-service communication, secrets stored in plaintext environment variables—these are the findings that dominate cloud pentest reports.

IAM: The Crown Jewels

Identity and Access Management is the most critical—and most commonly misconfigured—layer in any cloud environment. Cloud pentesting must evaluate whether IAM policies follow least-privilege principles, whether unused roles and credentials exist, whether privilege escalation paths allow a compromised service to reach sensitive resources, and whether cross-account access is properly restricted. A single overpermissive Lambda execution role can give an attacker access to every S3 bucket in your account.

Storage and Data Exposure

The number of data breaches that trace back to misconfigured S3 buckets, Azure Blob containers, or GCP Cloud Storage objects is staggering. Testing must verify that storage permissions are properly scoped, that public access is intentional where it exists, that encryption is applied at rest and in transit, and that logging captures access to sensitive objects.

Network and Service Configuration

Cloud network testing evaluates security groups, network ACLs, VPC configurations, exposed services, and the communication paths between cloud resources. Can an attacker reach internal services from the public internet? Are management interfaces (RDP, SSH, admin consoles) properly restricted? Is east-west traffic between services encrypted and authenticated?

Why Provider Expertise Matters

Penetrify's cloud penetration testing covers AWS, Azure, and GCP with testers who hold cloud-specific certifications and understand the nuances of each provider's security model. The difference between a cloud-aware pentester and a generalist who treats cloud like any other network is the difference between finding the IAM privilege escalation chain that leads to full account compromise and producing a report of generic CVEs that miss the real risk.