Why cloud misconfigurations still happen and how to catch them before attackers do
Cloud misconfigurations are still one of the top causes of breaches in 2025.
And after scanning more than 2.000 cloud configurations in recent months, we've seen a clear pattern:
Even teams with mature DevOps and expensive security tools still miss critical exposures.
Let's talk about why this happens and how you can catch these issues before attackers do.
Why misconfigurations still happen
The cloud was supposed to make everything easier. But in practice, it often makes visibility harder.
Here are the four main reasons misconfigurations persist—even in well-run environments:
1. Everything is "temporary"
A test environment.
A staging bucket.
A VM spun up "just for now."
The problem? Nobody goes back to clean it up. It stays online, vulnerable, and often public.
2. IAM is a mess
Cloud permissions evolve over time.
Roles are cloned. Policies are stacked.
And over-permissioned accounts become the norm.
Even experienced teams struggle to understand who has access to what.
3. Multi-cloud ≠ full visibility
Security teams often rely on siloed dashboards.
But assets live across AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean—even old servers someone forgot.
Without unified visibility, you can't secure what you don't see.
4. Compliance doesn't mean security
Passing an audit means hitting checkboxes.
But attackers don't care about your SOC 2 badge.
They care about exposed endpoints, public buckets, and open ports.
What you can do about it
Tools don't solve this alone.
What does?
✅ Continuous visibility: not point-in-time scans
✅ Drift detection: configs change daily, alerts must keep up
✅ Noise reduction: false positives train teams to ignore real issues
✅ Cloud-native coverage: across your actual environments
That's why we built Tresal combining ASM and CSPM into one lightweight platform:
⚡ Get alerted in minutes, not weeks
💡 Skip the complexity and costs of legacy tools
🇪🇺 Hosted in Europe, built for lean security teams
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Tayfun
Cloud Security Architect
Security expert specializing in attack surface management and vulnerability detection.
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