What is cloud network security?
Cloud network security safeguards your applications, data, and underlying infrastructure in the cloud with a combination of tools and best practices. Common tools and safeguards include:
Firewalls
Network access control
Virtual private clouds (VPCs)
Subnets
Security groups
Service meshes
Continual scanning and real-time insights
Security information and event management
The holistic approach ensures that firewalls, access controls, VPCs, and monitoring tools work together to segment traffic, enforce least-privilege access, and detect suspicious behaviors quickly. Unlike traditional on-premise infrastructures, cloud-based network security must adapt to a fast-moving, distributed environment. Preventing small misconfigurations and threats early on stops them from growing into significant breaches.
Learn how to strengthen your cloud security to protect your assets from unauthorized access, modification, exposure, and misuse.
Expose cloud risks no other tool can
Learn how Wiz Cloud surfaces toxic combinations across misconfigurations, identities, vulnerabilities, and data—so you can take action fast.
Key benefits of modern cloud network security
By choosing a modern cloud network security solution, you can unify your security across all environments. This simplifies your landscape by providing more control over your infrastructure, especially with targeted best practices for your specific environment, such as AWS, Azure, and Google.
In addition to helping you segment your resources and providing more visibility, a modern security approach also delivers key benefits, like:
Comprehensive visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
Automated compliance and audit readiness
Contextual risk prioritization to focus on the most dangerous threats
Rapid detection and response
While these benefits create streamlined and safer clouds, not all solutions provide the cloud-native approach you need to manage the unique challenges of a complex, multi-cloud infrastructure.
The evolving threat landscape and key challenges for cloud networks
Traditional cloud network security measures for on-premises data centers primarily focus on static defenses and guardrails. These include perimeter firewalls, network boundary security, network traffic regulation, and access control for preventing unauthorized access. But these mechanisms are becoming increasingly inadequate for modern cloud environments.
Cloud environments have transformed workplaces and introduced new security risks. Anyone, at any time, from any device, anywhere, can access sensitive data if security measures are lacking. When you add multiple cloud environments, along with hybrid settings, your team has to manage a complex environment while operating under the shared responsibility model.
Multi-cloud environments are challenging to protect without the right security tools and cloud-native practices. This challenge, often compounded by new technology, creates immense pressure for even the largest enterprises. In 2025, for instance, researchers discovered a vulnerability in a McDonald’s AI hiring bot that allowed them to access data by exploiting a weak administrator password, “123456.” This simple (yet avoidable) security flaw exposed millions of job candidates, revealing sensitive information, such as:
Full names
Email addresses
Phone numbers
Resumes
Chat transcripts
Had this vulnerability gone undiscovered, it would have opened the door for job scammers to obtain even more sensitive data from unsuspecting applicants.
Considering challenges like these, the only solution is to gain visibility into your entire cloud landscape. This enables you to cover all possible attack entry points and identify and mitigate threats effectively.
Cloud network security threats and risks
Implementing a comprehensive cloud network security strategy requires a clear understanding of the security threats that jeopardize your cloud resources. Without this understanding and a well-defined security perimeter, it’s impossible to form a strong plan.
Here are the top risks to keep in mind:
| Risk | Description |
|---|---|
| Misconfigurations | Regular monitoring and well-defined security baselines for cloud networks can help you streamline threat detection and minimize undetected security weaknesses. |
| Data breaches | The cloud contains a large pool of data accessible to attackers from anywhere. To expand a data breach’s scope, attackers can leverage lateral movement and exploit vulnerabilities in cloud service APIs. |
| Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks | The ultimate goal of a DOS attack is to disrupt critical business applications by overwhelming them with traffic that looks legitimate at the outset. |
| Unauthorized access | Cloud users and even administrators can fall victim to phishing scams or brute force attacks that aim to steal access credentials to infiltrate cloud environments. |
Because the threat landscape is so varied, securing your cloud network requires a nuanced, multi-layer defense cloud strategy that includes the following key components:
Network segmentation: Use native controls or third-party solutions to create isolated network segments that limit traffic flow between cloud resources.
Security groups and firewalls: Use security groups and firewalls as vigilant gatekeepers to identify attackers attempting to exploit your network and gain unauthorized access.
Contextual visibility through monitoring: Correlate aspects like user identity, access attempts, and resource usage to identify patterns that indicate potential infiltration.
Identity and access management (IAM): Adopt IAM to establish who can access what in the cloud. It’s best practice to follow the principle of least privilege to ensure malicious actors can’t manipulate your cloud network security controls.
Given the evolving and diverse threat landscape, your security team must continuously prepare and adapt to new challenges in the cloud. However, traditional, manual methods are no longer sufficient for securing environments, especially when managing complex systems with hundreds of alerts. To combat this complexity, more teams are adopting context-driven tools that reduce alert fatigue and help them prioritize the most dangerous vulnerabilities.
By combining your network security tool with a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) that features agentless scanning, you can optimize contextual alerts and strengthen all relevant tools to better safeguard your infrastructure against the cloud threat landscape.
Free Cloud Security Risk Assessment
Connect with a Wiz expert for a personal walkthrough of the critical risks in each layer of your environment.
Request my assessment
Modern architecture patterns for cloud network security
A network security solution should have the latest architecture that reflects current multi-cloud infrastructure needs. Your cloud network security tool should also contain the following capabilities:
VPCs and subnets: Isolate workloads with private addresses so you can control routing, firewall policies, and access-control lists.
Hybrid and cloud-native networking: Reinforce hybrid cloud environments with secure VPNs, private API access, micro-segmentation, and zero-trust mechanisms.
Service meshes: Add proxies, like AWS App Mesh, to provide service-to-service communication through enforceable policies and authentication.
Implementing these network security features helps you protect and strengthen your cloud security across your resources.
Strategic security best practices for cloud networks
While modern architecture lays the groundwork for better security, your team will also need to apply the latest security practices to run a successful cloud network security program. Here are some of the best security tactics you can apply:
Implement zero-trust segmentation and dynamic access
Start by adopting a zero-trust model that requires identity- and context-based verification for each connection. For example, your team should use multi-factor authentication and consider restricting resources based on location, device, schedule, and time zone. Layer micro-segmentation onto this model to separate workloads into isolated, unique environments with fine-grained access controls.
This architectural improvement protects access and limits exposure. For example, if a malicious actor compromises a container, lateral movement across environments would be blocked by identity-based segmentation.
⚒️ Action step: Use a CNAPP to simulate attack paths and identify areas of weak segmentation to implement identity security controls for those resources.
Use network-as-code to automate and enforce security policies
Adopt network-as-code alongside infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and policy-as-code to secure your entire environment. This approach allows you to define, version, and deploy configurations for your network topologies, compute, storage, and access controls throughout your network and cloud architecture.
One way to implement these policies is by using a tool like Terraform to define your VPC configurations and implement open policy agent rules to minimize the deployment of storage buckets with internet exposure. You can also automate enforcement through compliance checks in your CI/CD pipeline.
⚒️ Action step: Use Wiz for IaC scanning to identify misconfigurations in resources before deployment and enforce network-as-code policies.
Continuously monitor and audit systems to maintain compliance visibility
Cloud infrastructures involve multiple environments, and without complete visibility, your team is more likely to face a preventable breach due to gaps in vulnerability management. However, continuous monitoring helps unify these environments, allowing your DevSecOps team to find configuration drifts, anomalies, compliance gaps, and other red flags in real time.
By continuously monitoring for vulnerabilities and compliance standards, you can maintain real-time security for your organization. You can use CNAPPs like Wiz to run security checks against over 100 compliance frameworks, including NIST, HIPAA, and CIS. Our solution also provides agentless visibility and monitoring through Wiz Defend.
⚒️ Action step: Run a complete network exposure assessment to find sensitive, public-facing cloud assets. Additionally, review and audit your organization to ensure compliance with relevant standards.
How Wiz strengthens cloud network security
Securing your cloud network takes more than point solutions. It requires full visibility, clear context, and the ability to act quickly across your environment, especially in complex, distributed architectures.
Wiz helps by integrating network context into your broader cloud security program. Here's how:
Effective network exposure visibility: Wiz analyzes your cloud network infrastructure, including VPCs, subnets, load balancers, and network interfaces. It’s agentless and gives you a clear picture of which assets are exposed and how traffic flows between them.
Misconfiguration identification: Wiz surfaces risky network configurations that could lead to attacks like remote code execution, cryptojacking, or botnet activity. It also connects these risks with broader cloud context, helping you prioritize what to fix first.
Threat prioritization powered by Wiz Research: We augment our threat intelligence information with data powered by Wiz Research. The Wiz Security Graph brings together real-time threat intelligence, attacker behavior, and your network data. You get a focused view of the most critical threats and actionable steps for remediation.
Streamlined integration: Wiz offers out-of-the-box integration with tools like Fortinet, Illumio, Netography, and Netskope. You get deeper visibility without changing your existing workflows.
Wiz gives you one place to see, understand, and act on network risks. With our cloud-native approach, you can reduce your attack surface, accelerate remediation, and strengthen your cloud defenses.
Schedule a demo today to upgrade your cloud security with Wiz and protect your organization against modern cloud threats.
Curious how your security posture holds up? Get our free cloud security assessment to see where you stand in the threat landscape—and what you can do to improve your security.
