Cloud configured wrong is a breach waiting.
Cloud security hardening — IAM audit, network segmentation, threat detection, and compliance automation. Find the misconfiguration before attackers do.
CIS
Benchmark coverage
v1.5 AWS / GCP / Azure
SOC 2
HIPAA · PCI DSS
All major frameworks
5 days
Assessment report
Severity-ranked findings
0
Production disruption
Read-only passive audit
Security Domains
Hardening across every attack surface
Six security domains covered in every engagement. IAM, network, detection, compliance, secrets, and vulnerability management.
Most common breach vector
IAM & Least Privilege
Audit and harden every IAM role, policy, and user. Eliminate over-privileged access, root account usage, and long-lived access keys. MFA enforced on all human accounts.
VPC architecture review
Network Segmentation
VPC architecture review — public vs private subnet separation, security group audit, NACLs, and bastion/jump host elimination via SSM Session Manager.
Always watching
Threat Detection & SIEM
GuardDuty (AWS), Security Command Center (GCP), or Defender (Azure) enabled and tuned. Alerts routed to your SIEM with actionable runbooks — not noise.
SOC 2 / PCI / HIPAA
Compliance Automation
AWS Config rules, GCP Security Health Analytics, or Azure Policy for continuous compliance checking against SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and CIS benchmarks.
Zero plaintext credentials
Secrets & Key Management
Secrets Manager / Key Vault / Secret Manager for all credentials. Automatic rotation, encryption key hierarchy, and CloudTrail/audit log integrity.
CVE monitoring + pen test
Vulnerability Management
Container image scanning (Trivy, ECR scanning), OS patch management, dependency CVE monitoring, and regular penetration testing coordination.
Compliance Frameworks
Controls for every major framework
Technical controls implemented in cloud config. Third-party auditor handles the audit itself.
SOC 2 Type II
Security, availability, and confidentiality controls mapped to your cloud architecture. Evidence collection automated via Config rules and CloudTrail.
PCI DSS
Network segmentation, logging, and key management aligned to PCI cardholder data requirements. Quarterly vulnerability scans included.
HIPAA
PHI access controls, encryption, audit logging, and business associate agreement support. Technical safeguards implemented in cloud configuration.
ISO 27001
Information security management system controls implemented in cloud configuration. Evidence collection ready for third-party audit.
Misconfigurations that become breaches
The most common cloud breaches are not sophisticated attacks — they're preventable configuration mistakes. Here's how we fix each one.
Overprivileged IAM Is The #1 Cloud Breach Vector
Most cloud breaches don't involve sophisticated exploits — they involve admin IAM roles attached to application workloads, long-lived access keys in CI/CD environment variables, and no MFA on root accounts. One compromised key with admin access is a full account takeover. These are configuration errors, not advanced attacks.
Our approach
Full IAM audit: every role, policy, user, and key. Least-privilege rebuild for application workloads. OIDC-based auth for CI/CD (no long-lived keys). MFA enforced on all human accounts. Unused access removed.
Assess → Plan → Harden → Monitor
Assessment in 5 days. Remediation in 4–6 weeks. Ongoing monitoring from there.
Security Assessment
CIS benchmark scan against your cloud config. IAM audit, network map, and public exposure review — with risk severity ratings. Delivered in 3–5 business days.
Remediation Plan
Findings ranked by exploitability and business impact. 30/60/90-day remediation roadmap with effort estimates. You decide what to fix first.
Hardening Implementation
We implement the remediations — IAM policies, security group rules, encryption config, and detective controls. Each change tested in staging before production.
Ongoing Monitoring
Continuous compliance checks, weekly vulnerability scan reports, and quarterly penetration test coordination. Security posture improves over time, not just at audit time.
Questions we get all the time
If yours is not here, reach out. We respond within 24 hours with a real answer from an engineer — not a sales pitch.
We use read-only access scoped to security-relevant APIs. The assessment is passive — we analyze configuration, not traffic. No production workloads are touched. The assessment typically completes in 3–5 business days and produces a written report with severity-ranked findings.
Overly permissive IAM — roles with admin access used for application workloads, long-lived access keys in CI/CD, and no MFA on root/admin accounts. A close second is public S3 buckets containing sensitive data. Both are configuration errors, not sophisticated attacks — and both are preventable.
Start with a gap assessment — we map your current cloud controls against SOC 2 Trust Service Criteria and identify what's missing. Cloud controls cover a significant portion of SOC 2 requirements (logging, encryption, access control, change management). We implement the technical controls; your compliance team or a third-party auditor handles the audit itself.
For clients on managed plans: on-call response within 15 minutes, containment as first priority (isolate affected resources), investigation, and remediation. For project engagements: incident response consulting on a time-and-materials basis. We've handled S3 data exposures, compromised access keys, and malware in container images.
The standard cloud security assessment is configuration-focused — CIS benchmark scanning, IAM audit, and network review against your live setup. Penetration testing (simulated attacks against your applications and network) is a separate engagement we coordinate, often with a specialized third-party firm so the test is independent. For most clients we recommend the config assessment first, since the majority of breaches start from misconfiguration, not exploited code.
Technical cloud controls — logging, encryption, access control, change management — typically take 4-6 weeks to implement after the gap assessment. That covers a large portion of SOC 2 Trust Service Criteria and HIPAA technical safeguards. The full certification timeline depends on your auditor and observation period (SOC 2 Type II requires several months of evidence), but we get the cloud side audit-ready quickly and automate evidence collection via Config rules and CloudTrail.
The read-only CIS-benchmark assessment with a severity-ranked written report is a fixed fee, typically in the low five figures depending on account count and cloud providers in scope. Remediation implementation (IAM rebuild, network hardening, detective controls) is scoped separately over a 4-6 week window. Ongoing monitoring with quarterly pen-test coordination is available as a monthly retainer for teams that want continuous coverage.
“We needed smart contract work done right — no shortcuts. Their blockchain team audited, optimized, and deployed our DeFi protocol with zero post-launch issues.”
Alex Chen
Founder · Meridian DeFi · Singapore
Know your cloud security
posture in 5 days.
Free 30-minute security review call — we'll identify your highest-risk misconfiguration without needing any cloud access. Then scope a proper assessment if warranted.
