What is cloud vulnerability management?
Cloud vulnerability management is the continuous process of identifying, classifying, prioritizing, and remediating security vulnerabilities across cloud environments. According to CISA, this stems from a vulnerability in its assets, which can include people, information, and technology. This systematic approach ensures organizations can protect their cloud infrastructure from evolving threats while maintaining operational efficiency.
The shift to cloud-first operations makes this discipline essential. According to Google Cloud, only 7% of technology leaders reported that their companies primarily use on-premises IT infrastructure. Cloud vulnerability management is now a requirement for holistic IT protection as cloud environments have become the standard for modern enterprises.
Cloud vulnerability management is critical for creating and fostering secure cloud environments and software development lifecycles (SDLCs). And though the conversation around cloud security often focuses on the potent vulnerabilities and security threats that are introduced in these dynamic environments, it's important to remember that cloud environments inherently feature more advanced vulnerability management capabilities to tackle these threats.
The 6 most common cloud vulnerabilities
Effective prioritization separates successful cloud vulnerability management from overwhelming alert fatigue. While thousands of vulnerabilities can affect cloud environments, only a subset poses real risk to your specific infrastructure.
Cloud vulnerabilities differ from traditional IT risks because they involve dynamic, interconnected services that can amplify attack impact. Here are six critical vulnerability types that demand immediate attention in cloud environments.
1. API vulnerabilities
APIs are the software that allow different cloud services to seamlessly integrate and interact with each other. Enterprises use multiple kinds of API architectures for their needs, including REST, SOAP, RPC, and GraphQL. APIs enable different cloud services to integrate and interact seamlessly, making them critical infrastructure components. However, this connectivity creates significant security exposure.
API vulnerabilities can compromise entire cloud environments through multiple attack vectors. According to OWASP, the most dangerous threats include security misconfigurations, broken authentication, and unrestricted resource consumption. Cybercriminals frequently exploit these weaknesses to launch lateral attacks across connected systems.
An API vulnerability was recently identified as the cause of significant data exposure for Honda. This API vulnerability, which involved suboptimal access controls, potentially exposed more than 21,000 customers' data, 3500 dealers' information, and 11,000 customers' names and email IDs.
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2. Unencrypted data
There are considerable benefits to storing data in the cloud, including cost savings, redundancy, accessibility, and scalability. However, data needs to be encrypted to remain safe in the cloud. Threat actors will struggle to abuse or leverage encrypted data, even if they manage to breach an enterprise's cloud defenses. Unencrypted data results in more destructive data breaches, many of which can be hard to recover from.
3. Misconfigurations
Misconfigurations are mistakes in the security settings of cloud technologies including VMs, containers, container registries, and virtual appliances. Cloud misconfigurations can include exposed data, overprivileged identities, and weak password protocols and credential hygiene. There are many reasons for cloud misconfigurations, many of them stemming from the tendency to prioritize developmental agility over safety.
4. Shadow IT
Shadow IT refers to any cloud resource that is commissioned without the official authorization of an enterprise's IT department. Shadow IT is an increasingly common and inevitable occurrence in modern organizations. Various personnel and teams within an organization may choose to self-optimize performance and productivity by commissioning third-party resources. This choice to sidestep official (and potentially complex) commissioning processes can lead to hidden vulnerabilities and a general lack of visibility across cloud environments.
5. Poor visibility
Unlike previous eras when only select IT personnel could alter the enterprise's IT infrastructure, a broad range of professionals across an organization can now commission cloud resources. Modern cloud environments are constantly in flux, rapidly expanding and evolving. This makes visibility across cloud topologies challenging, which can create blind spots and allow cloud vulnerabilities to fester unnoticed.
The insurance company Trygg-Hansa was fined $3 million by the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of customers' data was exposed for almost two and a half years. Poor visibility is often the cause of cloud vulnerabilities and data exposure going unnoticed for long periods.
6. Suboptimal IAM
The number of human and machine identities interacting with an enterprise cloud environment is immense. Identity access management (IAM) vulnerabilities are essentially mistakes in the privileges bestowed on these identities, and these can be dangerous attack vectors. Overprivileged identities, both human and machine, are a major cloud security vulnerability because they enable higher degrees of access and activity for account hijackers.
Best practices for prioritizing cloud vulnerabilities
Risk-based prioritization transforms vulnerability management from reactive firefighting into strategic security operations. Not all vulnerabilities pose equal threat—some create catastrophic exposure while others waste valuable resources on irrelevant issues.
Cloud-specific context determines vulnerability criticality. A medium-severity vulnerability in an internet-exposed container with admin privileges poses far greater risk than a critical vulnerability in an isolated development environment.
Below are a few best practices to ensure the effective prioritization of cloud vulnerabilities.
Understand the cloud value of technologies
Assess each technology's potential impact on cloud operations before investing remediation resources. Focus prioritization efforts on systems that directly affect cloud security posture and business operations.
High-impact cloud technologies include servers, containers, CDNs, serverless functions, Kubernetes clusters, and virtual machines. Lower-impact technologies like printers, routers, and isolated on-premises infrastructure typically don't create cloud exposure paths.
View your cloud vulnerabilities from a threat actor’s perspective
Think like an attacker to prioritize like a defender. Understanding threat actor motivations helps identify which vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk to your specific environment and business operations.
Common attacker objectives include data exfiltration, credential theft, cryptomining, supply chain compromise, and lateral movement. Map your vulnerabilities against these goals to focus on exposures that enable high-impact attacks.
Certain vulnerabilities may be exploited to facilitate direct attacks, and others may be exploited as a first step in a more complex attack. Viewing cloud vulnerabilities from the point of view of cybercriminals can help you understand the attack path, context, and how they may attempt to exploit a potential cloud vulnerability.
Utilize CVSS metrics and threat intelligence
CVSS scores provide standardized vulnerability severity ratings from 0 (none) to 10.0 (critical), offering a consistent baseline for initial risk assessment.
However, CVSS alone doesn't reflect business-specific risk. A critical-rated vulnerability in an isolated system may pose less threat than a medium-rated vulnerability in internet-exposed infrastructure. Use CVSS as a starting point, then layer in business context, threat intelligence from sources like CISA KEV, and environmental factors for accurate prioritization.
Embrace multiple layers of prioritization
Layered prioritization delivers more accurate risk assessment than any single factor alone. Modern cloud environments require multiple risk filters working together to identify true business impact.
Effective prioritization combines multiple risk factors: vulnerability severity, asset criticality, network exposure, data sensitivity, and threat intelligence. The more comprehensive your filtering approach, the better your organization can focus resources on vulnerabilities that actually threaten business operations.
Remember: Identifying dangerous vulnerabilities is only the first step. Determining which vulnerabilities align with your risk tolerance and business priorities drives effective security investment decisions.
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Traditional vulnerability management vs. cloud vulnerability management
Cloud environments demand security solutions built for dynamic, interconnected infrastructure. Traditional vulnerability management tools struggle with the speed, scale, and complexity that define modern cloud operations.
Traditional approaches create more problems than they solve in cloud environments. These tools generate excessive alerts about non-critical issues while missing the contextual relationships that determine real risk. Context is the fundamental difference between traditional and cloud vulnerability management—understanding how vulnerabilities combine with exposures, permissions, and data sensitivity to create actual attack paths.
Context is one of the most important factors in cloud vulnerability management. Cloud vulnerability management needs to acknowledge workload, business, and cloud context to identify and remediate vulnerabilities based on how much damage they can potentially cause a particular organization. Cloud-based vulnerability management can weave in factors such as identities, secrets, and exposures, as well as internal and publicly available exploit data and threat intelligence to accurately and continuously identify and prioritize vulnerabilities.
Cloud-based vulnerability management also enables enterprises to integrate vulnerability management early in SDLCs. Early integration means that potent cloud vulnerabilities can be addressed from build to deployment. The widespread exposure of secrets—with Wiz Research finding that 61% of organizations have secrets exposed in public repositories—makes credential scanning critical throughout the development lifecycle.
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Key features for cloud vulnerability management tools
Effective cloud vulnerability management solutions eliminate alert fatigue while ensuring comprehensive protection. The right solution should prioritize real risks, integrate seamlessly with cloud operations, and scale with your infrastructure growth.
Essential capabilities include:
Prioritized cloud vulnerabilities: Alert fatigue is not an option for enterprises. Knowing which vulnerabilities not to address is just as important as knowing which vulnerabilities require swift remediation. Every cloud vulnerability management tool should be able to prioritize cloud vulnerabilities based on business-specific factors.
Agentless scanning: Agent-based scanners have been effective in the past, but the cloud calls for quicker, less complicated, and more accurate scanning capabilities. Agentless scanners offer streamlined deployment, high efficiency, and cost savings. They are also more DevOps and CI/CD-friendly, a necessity for high-octane enterprises.
Extensive cloud vulnerability catalogs: There are thousands of vulnerabilities that can impact cloud-based operations. Cloud vulnerability management tools need to be informed by multiple vulnerability catalogs that include vulnerabilities across cloud technologies. They should also ideally be supported by an independent vulnerability intelligence and research program that actively catalogs unknown vulnerabilities and stays on top of new cybersecurity threats and trends.
Holistic cross-cloud functionality: Most modern cloud-based infrastructures are a combination of disparate IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services and technologies from multiple providers. An effective cloud vulnerability management tool needs to be compatible and operate seamlessly across these complex and ever-changing cloud architectures.
Flexible compliance capabilities: Cybersecurity and compliance work hand in hand, each influencing the other. Cloud compliance can become extremely complex and troublesome if neglected, especially as certain regulations like PCI DSS require vulnerability assessments by approved vendors. Cloud vulnerability management tools should feature options to conform to these standards as well as be manually configured to the specific needs of a particular organization.
Traditional VM tools only produce simple table-based reports with only a basic snapshot of vulnerabilities at a given time. Advanced vulnerability management solutions consolidate information from multiple scans and provide information on what has changed over time.
How to implement cloud vulnerability management
A successful cloud vulnerability management program is a cycle, not a one-time project. It involves continuous discovery, prioritization, and remediation. Here is a practical, step-by-step process for implementing it in your organization.
1. Discover and inventory all cloud assets
You cannot protect what you cannot see. The first step is to create a comprehensive inventory of all assets in your cloud environment. This includes virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, databases, and storage buckets across all your cloud providers. An agentless approach is best for achieving 100% coverage quickly.
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2. Implement continuous and automated scanning
Once you have visibility, set up automated scans to continuously look for vulnerabilities across your entire asset inventory. Scanning should be an ongoing process that identifies new vulnerabilities in existing assets and checks new assets as they are deployed.
3. Prioritize vulnerabilities with context
Instead of just relying on CVSS scores, prioritize vulnerabilities by correlating them with other risk factors. As CISA recommends, organizations should establish a classification scale (e.g., critical, high, medium, low) with a defined remediation timeframe for each level. A vulnerability on an internet-exposed server with high privileges and access to sensitive data is far more critical than an isolated one. This contextual approach helps you focus on what truly matters and reduces alert fatigue.
4. Remediate and validate fixes
Assign clear ownership for remediation and provide developers with the context they need to fix issues quickly. After a patch is applied, rescan the asset to validate that the vulnerability has been successfully resolved. This closes the loop and ensures the risk is eliminated.
5. Integrate security into the development lifecycle
Shift security left by integrating vulnerability scanning directly into your CI/CD pipeline. Scan Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates and container images before they are deployed to prevent new vulnerabilities from ever reaching your production environment. A platform like Wiz enables this entire step-by-step implementation at scale, providing a single pane of glass to manage risk from code to cloud.
Measuring success: KPIs for cloud vulnerability management
To ensure your vulnerability management program is effective, you need to track its performance. Vulnerability management metrics help you measure progress, justify investments, and identify areas for improvement. Here are some of the most important KPIs to monitor:
Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR): This measures the average time it takes for your team to fix a vulnerability after it has been discovered. Tracking MTTR for critical vulnerabilities is especially important, as it shows how quickly you are closing your most significant security gaps.
Vulnerability Age: This KPI tracks how long vulnerabilities have remained open in your environment. A high number of old, unpatched vulnerabilities indicates a backlog and potential gaps in your remediation process.
Scan Coverage: This measures the percentage of your cloud assets that are being actively scanned for vulnerabilities. The goal should be 100% coverage to ensure there are no blind spots in your environment.
Reduction in Critical Vulnerabilities: Monitor the overall number of critical and high-severity vulnerabilities over time. A downward trend indicates that your program is successfully reducing the most significant risks to your organization.
Remediation Rate: This is the percentage of discovered vulnerabilities that are successfully remediated within a specific timeframe. It helps you understand the efficiency of your remediation workflows and team capacity.
The Wiz approach to cloud vulnerability management
The cloud is often represented as a cybersecurity headache, but the right vulnerability management solution can unveil the advanced cybersecurity capabilities of cloud technologies. Wiz's agentless and cloud native vulnerability management solution proves that cloud environments can be security powerhouses rather than security risks. Our platform can provide your organization with a powerful cloud-based engine with robust fortifications. Most importantly, Wiz's cloud vulnerability management solution ensures that your organization addresses vulnerabilities that actually matter to your circumstances.
Get a demo now to explore why Wiz leads the industry in cloud vulnerability management.