What is a cloud security audit?
Aimed at verifying security, compliance, and operational resilience, a cloud security audit is a structured evaluation of an organization's cloud environments, infrastructure, configurations, access controls, and security policies.
Internal cloud security audits are proactive assessments carried out by enterprise security and risk management teams to spot unresolved risks, verify compliance, and tighten risk management measures. External cloud security audits are conducted by regulatory compliance agencies or third-party partners to boost customer trust and show regulatory bodies evidence of standards compliance. While audits were traditionally conducted at fixed intervals, many organizations now rely on continuous audit practices supported by agentless CNAPP platforms that provide real-time visibility and ongoing compliance tracking.
Whether you’re considering an external or internal cloud security audit, this article is your complete guide to doing it right.
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Types of cloud security audits
Cloud security audits vary by goal and focus. Understanding the different types will help your enterprise choose the right one for your needs:
Compliance audits benchmark cloud security controls against documented frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Compliance audits are compulsory for:
Organizations operating in highly regulated regions (like the EU where GDPR is mandatory for data protection);
Organizations doing business with governments (e.g., FedRAMP for the U.S.); and
Organizations in industries such as healthcare (HIPAA) and finance (e.g., PCI DSS).
Risk-based audits assess potential risks in an organization’s cloud stack, including threats (like ransomware and supply chain attacks), sensitive assets (like customer data and secrets), and high-impact business systems.
Configuration audits review account and service-level configurations, such as database permissions and network security groups (NSGs), for misconfigurations and drift that could put workloads and data at risk.
Access and identity audits evaluate identity and access management (IAM) roles, policies, and effective permissions to ensure access control measures like zero trust and least privilege are in place.
Data security audits check that sensitive data is stored and transmitted securely by assessing data encryption status (is data encrypted in transit and at rest?), monitoring access patterns (who has access to sensitive data, when, and why?), and verifying the existence of data loss prevention measures (like backup).
Many organizations blend compliance and risk-based audits using platforms that map cloud risks—like misconfigurations, exposed identities, and data leakage—back to specific controls in frameworks like NIST, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
Key components of a cloud security audit
To execute a successful cloud security audit, teams must know what assets and workflows to audit, as well as the risk indicators to look out for when auditing. Below are eight important components to audit, each mapped to risks and operational gaps that, if overlooked, can put enterprises at risk for cyberattacks:
1. Asset inventory: Untracked resources are top attack vectors. Asset inventories identify shadow IT and facilitate proper governance by verifying that…
All cloud assets, including containers, APIs, VMs, and storage buckets are automatically discovered as they come online
Resource tagging is in place for all assets and labels (such as ownership, environment, and sensitivity) and tags are consistent and standards-compliant
Asset relationships are mapped (for example, by visualizing K8s containers connected to storage buckets). Modern audit platforms should also surface toxic combinations—like publicly accessible services with active secrets or admin-level access—by correlating identity, exposure, and data context in a unified view.
2. Identity & access management (IAM):
Audit roles, policies, and permissions to ascertain that human and non-human identities have only the minimum access they require in line with the principle of least privilege (POLP).
Check for orphaned accounts, dormant user roles and permissions, and expired API keys to ensure that your assets aren’t at risk of unauthorized access.
Evaluate role-based trust relationships, focusing on IAM roles, trust policies, and cross-account access permissions to make sure that POLP, MFA, and permissions boundaries are in place. With these safeguards implemented, you can minimize the risk of lateral movement and privilege escalation.
CNAPP platforms can help by identifying high-blast-radius identities, surfacing excessive trust paths, and correlating them to sensitive data and reachable workloads—enabling proactive access cleanup.
3. Network security: Assessing network security controls can help uncover overlooked misconfigurations and attack paths.
Examine ingress/egress rules for misconfigurations like missing or overly permissive rules.
Confirm that internet-facing assets aren’t exposed.
Ensure firewall rules are properly configured to block unauthorized traffic.
Audit NSGs and network ACLs to fix overly permissive and inconsistent rules, eliminate overlapping policies, and ensure NSGs and ACLs are assigned to the appropriate assets.
4. Configuration management: Configuration audits ensure cloud resources adhere to secure-by-default baselines, and help detect known misconfiguration patterns that attackers often exploit.
Check that strong encryption mechanisms are implemented and encryption keys are protected.
Find and fix vulnerable VM, storage, and environment configurations/security controls.
Determine if logging and monitoring are implemented to provide visibility into user activities and detect security incidents early.
Uncover and remediate drift from baseline configurations.
5. Data security: Discovering data security and compliance issues early can help prevent breaches and compliance violation fines.
Check for proper data classification and labeling because improperly classified data is difficult to secure.
Confirm that access to sensitive data and intellectual property is on a need-to-use basis.
Verify that data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Map data residency laws to implement and fix non-compliance issues.
6. Compute: Auditing security controls in compute resources can help uncover attack paths and minimize resource-hijacking attacks.
Ensure system hardening processes like proper port management and patching cadence are implemented to minimize the attack surface.
Assess container images for vulnerabilities to prevent container/host system compromise and data breaches.
Review permissions, authentication mechanisms, and code vulnerabilities in serverless functions to ensure cloud security best practices are in place.
7. Monitoring & logging:
Review asset logging to confirm that all critical assets, including network, compute, and storage, are logged.
Ensure log retention policies match compliance requirements.
Verify that logs are reviewed regularly to spot threats and anomalies—such as unauthorized data manipulation—early. CNAPP platforms can also highlight critical assets or permissions that lack proper logging, helping close audit gaps before attackers exploit them.
8. Incident response (IR) readiness:
Check that IR plans have been created, circulated, and documented.
Verify that IR playbooks include clearly outlined processes for alerting requisite teams, reporting incidents to mandatory organizations, and taking the necessary actions for different types of incidents.
Validate playbooks and escalation processes across different scenarios.
How to conduct a cloud security audit step-by-step
Step 1: Define the audit scope
Begin by outlining the goal of the audit, which will determine the focus of the audit, the tools to employ, the assets and workloads to evaluate, the cloud providers and accounts to assess, the teams to involve, and the timelines to set.
Step 2: Assemble audit stakeholders
Mobilize cloud, security, GRC, and dev/platform teams to ensure seamless assessment and remediation.
Step 3: Collect data across environments
Collect data across environments using solutions that can normalize, correlate, and deduplicate findings from different security tools. These tools can help collect evidence of secure asset configurations, data handling, and user activity monitoring.
Step 4: Evaluate controls and posture
Map findings on asset configuration, logging and monitoring, data handling, and other areas to regulatory frameworks like NIST CSF, GDPR, and CIS Benchmarks.
Step 5: Identify gaps and prioritize risks
With the information from steps 3 and 4, your teams will uncover security weaknesses in existing safeguards. Use CNAPP platforms that correlate misconfigurations, identity paths, and sensitive data exposure to map weaknesses to realistic attack paths and business impact. Then, prioritize accordingly. Gaps to prioritize include high-risk, high-exploitability, and high-impact (e.g., compliance fines) risks.
Step 6: Document findings and recommendations
Your security tooling will typically offer recommendations for fixing the issues you’ve found. Apply the recommendations promptly and document the entire process, including your assessments, findings, and remediation.
Step 7: Track remediation and validate closure
Verify that remediations have been applied, that they were effective, and that issues flagged have been closed.
Best practices for audit readiness
Ready to start your cloud security audits? Here are five game-changing best practices to ensure your audits yield the right results.
Maintain continuous posture visibility using agentless tools: Don’t wait until the next audit because attacks may occur before then. Use agentless tools to effortlessly discover new assets, monitor activities, and detect security/compliance weaknesses across your entire stack. Conduct continuous cloud security risk assessments to identify and fix issues early.
Automate control validation via policy as code: Instead of running manual checks that take time and are error-prone, codify security controls and compliance laws into machine-readable policies. This will allow you to automate, scale, and accelerate cloud security audits while reducing human errors.
Integrate asset discovery and risk scoring into daily workflows: Many cloud resources are short-lived. That’s why continuous asset discovery, scanning, and monitoring is the only way to discover risks in real time. Once teams identify risks, prioritize them to ensure the most critical get fixed first.
Regularly audit IAM and service accounts for over-permissioning: By resolving excessive access privileges and abandoned accounts/roles proactively, you can significantly reduce your attack surface and the blast radius of security incidents.
Align internal assessments with compliance frameworks: Use CSPM tools to map compliance frameworks to controls in your stack: for instance, NIST 800-53 to IAM and data protection rules and GDPR to data residency policies.
Leverage graph-based modeling to connect the dots: Choose tools that map relationships between cloud resources, data, and identities. This graph-based visibility helps teams spot high-risk combinations—like admin users with access to unencrypted data in exposed workloads—that traditional tools miss.
Cloud security audit tools
Cloud native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) are the leading tool for cloud security audits. After all, a CNAPP provides complete visibility into assets, workloads, services, and configurations across entire cloud environments.
Here are some CNAPP components and how they turbocharge the audit process:
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) provides automated asset discovery and inventorying, misconfiguration detection, and compliance management.
Data security posture management (DSPM) benchmarks data protection and governance controls like encryption and labeling against compliance frameworks.
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) identifies IAM misconfigurations, provides monitoring data, and maps access permissions to cloud security standards.
This unified approach replaces fragmented, point-in-time checks with real-time audit readiness across all cloud layers.
How Wiz supports cloud security audits
Whether you’re preparing for a third-party audit or conducting ongoing internal assessments, Wiz delivers continuous audit readiness with prioritized, contextualized visibility—no agents required.
Wiz offers:
Unified asset inventorying across cloud accounts so you can see multi-cloud assets on a single dashboard as soon as they spin up.
Agentless visibility into identities, data, workloads, and misconfigurations, ensuring fast risk detection without any manual configuration. Correlation of posture, identity, and data risks to uncover high-impact issues—like publicly exposed storage buckets with reachable sensitive data and excessive access permissions.
Query-based investigations that let you tailor your search to meet specific audit requirements and replace manual log searching with instant data retrieval.
Customizable reports that provide granular, contextualized insights into security posture and audit readiness.
Continuous compliance mapping and reporting for frameworks like NIST, CIS, ISO, and 100+ others using the Wiz compliance heatmap, which gives you a bird’s eye view of your cloud compliance status in minutes.
Ready to cut audit prep from weeks to minutes? With Wiz, you get real-time inventory, automated control validation, and a unified view of your cloud risks. Request a demo to see how Wiz can help you simplify and strengthen cloud audits at scale.
