Identity compromises and process breakdowns are the primary drivers of impactful cloud breaches
The most damaging cloud security breaches aren’t coming from some mysterious, high-end zero-day exploits. They’re coming from inside, ordinary credentials falling into the wrong hands and simple mistakes in how systems are configured. That’s based on data from ReliaQuest’s Q3 2025 threat analysis. They found that nearly half, 44%, of confirmed cloud security alerts came down to identity issues. And here’s the real shocker: 99% of cloud identities had more access than they needed.
Why should CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs care? Because these identity and process issues are predictable, preventable, and still being ignored. Threat actors don’t need to invent new exploits, they just log in using stolen credentials, often obtained through phishing or leaked databases. Once in, they find accounts with too many permissions, and it’s game over. That’s how a routine compromise escalates into a serious disruption.
Process failure compounds the problem. We’re seeing legacy vulnerabilities, some tracked for years, resurface again and again as organizations spin up cloud assets quickly, but carelessly. Without proper validation baked into development and deployment, vulnerabilities get cloned at scale across environments. The race to deploy faster has also created foggy ownership over risk mitigation. This isn’t about innovation slowing down; it’s about innovation being done with discipline.
The point for leadership is clear: If you want to stop major cloud breaches, don’t just chase the next cutting-edge security tool. Start by fixing identity sprawl and improving how cloud assets are deployed. These are foundational issues, and the ROI of solving them is extremely high.
Over-privileged cloud identities significantly increase the risk and severity of breaches
Here’s the problem, most cloud users have far more access than they need. That’s not a slight misconfiguration. That’s the failure of a basic principle: least privilege. Giving users only what they absolutely need to get the job done. The reason attack impact scales so quickly once credentials get stolen is because attackers inherit full or near-full access by default.
According to ReliaQuest, 99% of cloud identities are over-permissioned. That means almost every single account could cause serious damage if compromised. More importantly, 52% of all identity-driven alerts involved attackers escalating privileges after an initial compromise. This is where most breaches level up, from inconvenient to catastrophic.
Big providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud ship with prebuilt admin roles that are easy to use, but dangerously broad. Convenience is killing security here. At the organizational level, it’s a tradeoff, speed versus security, and right now, speed is winning. But this approach doesn’t scale safely. If one engineer’s credentials get stolen and that account can access 90% of your infrastructure, you’re not managing risk, you’re inviting it.
For those in leadership, this is a leverage point. Implementing tighter access controls isn’t just about protecting data. It’s about preserving your optionality, your ability to expand without taking on compounding levels of cyber risk. Dynamic privilege audits, least-privilege policies baked into workflows, and limiting account lifespan with short-term credentials aren’t complex fixes. They’re high-value, straightforward steps that materially lower your breach risk.
The takeaway: breach severity depends on what a compromised account can access. The sooner executives act to restrict overreaching permissions, the less damage hackers can do when, not if, credentials leak. Security is not about making breach impossible. It’s about making breach survivable.
Identity-related alert volume is a major operational burden for security teams
Security teams are overwhelmed. One-third of all raw cloud security alerts are identity-related, 33%. These alerts take time, context, and manual investigation because machines can recognize unusual patterns, but only people can tell if those patterns are truly harmful. That’s a drain on resources few organizations can afford.
The overlap between the most common source of noise (identity alerts) and the most frequent cause of breaches (identity compromise) is creating an operational bottleneck. Security analysts must sort through massive volumes of low-certainty signals to identify the real threats. It’s slow. It’s expensive. It burns out top talent.
Automated systems can handle some of the workflow, like messaging users for session validation. But the review process isn’t simple. It relies on organizational policies, institutional knowledge, and real-time judgment to determine if a log-in attempt or elevated access is legitimate or part of a breach in progress.
Executives should see this not as an IT workflow issue but as a strategic one. The cost of slow detection is measured in data loss, downtime, and regulatory exposure. If security teams can’t cut through the noise efficiently, threat actors will continue to succeed by simply blending in. The alert noise needs filtering. The process needs reinforcing with automation that identifies context faster. And identity controls need flattening, so compromised credentials don’t trigger crisis-level responses every time.
The priority here isn’t just to reduce alert volume, it’s to improve signal quality. Give your security team fewer, better alerts. That’s where time, energy, and money actually pay off.
Legacy vulnerabilities are repeatedly reintroduced through flawed cloud deployment processes
Secure deployment is still lagging behind automation. Automated cloud infrastructure is valuable, there’s no question about it. But when organizations copy and redeploy code at scale without sufficient security validation, they replicate not just the infrastructure but also the vulnerabilities. Today, 71% of all critical vulnerability alerts tracked by ReliaQuest stemmed from only four known exploits: Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228), OpenSSH (CVE-2024-6387), Windows (CVE-2023-36884), and Jenkins (CVE-2024-23897).
These risks have been disclosed, patched, analyzed, and yet, they keep showing up because security hasn’t become an integral part of the deployment process. The pressure to move fast, combined with unclear ownership of cloud security responsibilities, results in asset sprawl filled with recycled weak points.
This is not just about technical debt. It’s about systemic risk generated by poor process discipline. And it’s compounding. The longer these cycles of inherited misconfigurations go unchecked, the worse the backlog becomes for security and compliance teams.
If you’re leading an organization with fast-scaling cloud initiatives, this should be on your radar. Every time infrastructure is deployed or modified without security testing, you’re increasing the cost and difficulty of fixing vulnerabilities later. Make security checks non-optional within DevOps workflows. Integrate threat detection during asset provisioning. Assign clear accountability for patching and validation.
The goal isn’t to slow down development, it’s to scale responsibly. Legacy issues don’t have to remain legacy problems. But they will if cloud security continues to be something added at the end.
Effective risk reduction depends on proactive cloud security practices
Preventing cloud breaches doesn’t come down to hope or guesswork. It comes down to doing the work early and consistently. The most effective way to get ahead of identity and process failures is to prevent them from happening at scale, and that requires building security into how your systems operate.
ReliaQuest’s report lays out practical steps: eliminate static AWS access keys for human users, adopt least-privilege access policies using built-in cloud controls, and incorporate automated security validation directly into development workflows. These aren’t speculative ideas. These are actions security-conscious organizations are already baking into their pipelines to reduce friction and risk.
What really matters here is continuous enforcement. Identity access should be dynamic, passwords and credentials should expire quickly. Permissions should be re-verified based on usage, and incident response should be prepared to trigger in real time. Waiting until a breach alert shows up isn’t a strategy; that’s a reaction. And the cost of reaction is always higher than the cost of preparation.
For executives and senior leaders, now is the time to treat security as a core function of product and infrastructure, not only as a compliance checklist. Build faster, yes, but build securely by design. There is no long-term scale without trust and control over the infrastructure your teams depend on.
Investing in proactive security doesn’t limit growth. It enables it with fewer surprises and far lower recovery costs. Risk doesn’t just go away. It gets managed, or it gets exploited.
Threat actors are moving toward fully automated intrusion pipelines using compromised credentials
Attackers don’t wait. They optimize. What used to take hours or days is being reduced to minutes. The process of compromising a cloud environment, from finding or buying leaked credentials, to logging in, to expanding control, is becoming automated. ReliaQuest’s forecast is clear: that entire chain is evolving into a single, efficient service.
Threat actors are already using infostealer logs to extract credential data. They’re purchasing access from specialized brokers. And they’re packaging these tools into repeatable workflows. The next step, automation that connects these stages, is already underway.
This shifts the timeline completely. Once credential data leaks, organizations will have far less time to detect and respond. Speed becomes a survival metric. Manual processes and delayed alerts aren’t going to contain the next wave of breaches. Detection and response need to operate in real time by default, not as a best-case scenario.
Leadership should recognize this shift for what it is: a structural change in how cybercrime operates. If your systems can’t match that speed with automation, you’re not competitive in security. Full lifecycle detection, automated containment, and responsive identity tools have to be on the roadmap.
Automation isn’t just useful anymore, it’s critical. You can’t run manual defense against machine-speed offense and expect to win. Closing the response gap is the next frontier in modern cloud defense. The organizations that align now will face fewer disruptions, fewer losses, and fewer post-incident regrets.
Security oversights and misconfigurations remain largely preventable
Most cloud breaches don’t require innovation from attackers. They succeed because of avoidable errors, excessive permissions, unpatched vulnerabilities, and disconnected processes. These aren’t new problems. They persist because security is still treated as a separate function, applied after things go live instead of built into how systems are developed and identities are managed from the start.
ReliaQuest’s analysis highlights that misconfigurations and process failures are driving the majority of serious incidents, not complicated exploits. When over-privileged accounts remain unmonitored, and legacy vulnerabilities are redeployed automatically, it’s not a technology failure, it’s a workflow failure. Access controls are neglected. Validation steps are skipped. And the cycle repeats as scale increases.
For C-suite leadership, this signals a need for structural adjustments. Security should not be confined to the end of a deployment sprint or triggered by a compliance deadline. It needs to be inserted early, tied into identity governance, enforced through CI/CD pipelines, and measured continuously. Teams should be trained to think in terms of secure defaults, not post-mortem fixes.
Process ownership is another critical issue. Many organizations still lack clarity about who owns risk remediation during deployment. The result is duplicated effort, blind spots, and delayed responses when incidents occur. Security must be everyone’s responsibility, but leadership must define what that ownership looks like across engineering, operations, and security teams.
The organizations that build tighter integration between security and operations will move faster and make fewer mistakes. Those relying on reactive models will continue to fall behind, adding cost and risk at every stage. Security needs to be part of the operating system of the company, not an overlay. The companies that get this right will have more resilience, more confidence in their digital operations, and fewer unnecessary fire drills.
Recap
Cloud security isn’t failing because threats are evolving too fast. It’s failing because basic controls aren’t being enforced. Over-permissioned accounts, weak identity practices, and unchecked deployment processes are driving the majority of impactful breaches, not zero-days, not highly advanced attackers.
This is good news for leadership. These risks are fixable, and the solutions don’t require massive overhauls, just clear ownership, disciplined implementation, and tighter automation where it counts. Treat least-privilege access, automated security validation, and real-time response as core functions, not optional upgrades. The investment is small compared to the cost of a major breach.
Security doesn’t start at the perimeter anymore. It starts with how your teams assign access, build infrastructure, and handle change. If those foundations are weak, the tools won’t save you. If those foundations are strong, your organization moves faster, with confidence.
The companies that win won’t be the ones chasing every new threat. They’ll be the ones who got the basics right and made security part of how they operate, not just how they react.
