As organisations scale their digital transformation strategies, multicloud environments have rapidly shifted from niche architecture to mainstream infrastructure. With 89% of organisations adopting a multicloud strategy (Flexera, 2024), the benefits are clear: greater flexibility, resilience, and reduced vendor lock-in. But these advantages come with new layers of security complexity.

Each additional platform, whether AWS, Azure, GCP, Huawei or others, increases the attack surface, amplifies compliance complexity, and elevates the risk of misconfiguration and policy drift.

At Deimos, I work with engineering and security teams to tackle these challenges in real world cloud environments. This article outlines five core multicloud security risks we regularly encounter, along with practical, scalable solutions that align with modern DevSecOps practices

1. Inconsistent Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Managing IAM across cloud providers introduces policy drift, inconsistent privilege enforcement, and limited visibility, especially when both human and machine identities (e.g., service accounts, containers, APIs) are involved. Without unified governance, the risk of privilege creep, shadow admins, and lateral movement increases significantly.

Recommended Approach:

• JumpCloud: Centralise user identity management and simplify directory services across providers.
• SailPoint IdentityNow (IGA): Provides robust identity lifecycle management across hybrid cloud environments, automating access reviews and enforcing compliance.
• CyberArk / Segura (PAM): Used to secure high privilege credentials and DevOps secrets, ensuring that elevated access is strictly controlled and monitored.
• Zero Trust Alignment: Combining IGA and PAM tools enforces least privilege and supports a zero trust security architecture.

🔗 Explore our IAM and Cloud Security capabilities

2. Lack of Centralised Visibility & Monitoring

Each cloud provider offers native observability tools, but they rarely integrate seamlessly. This leads to fragmented telemetry and makes it difficult for security teams to detect threats across environments.

Recommended Approach:

• Elastic Stack via ECK: Deploy a self-hosted Elastic Stack on Kubernetes using Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) for unified log, metrics, and trace ingestion.
• Wazuh Integration: Extend detection capabilities with host intrusion detection and real-time alerting.
• Elastic SIEM + ML Detection: Use Elastic Security’s built-in machine learning to detect behavioural anomalies and reduce alert fatigue.
• Agent Fleet Management: Elastic Agent Fleet enables standardised observability across distributed workloads.

🔗 See how we integrate observability into our Managed Platforms

3. Misconfigurations & Policy Drift

Cloud misconfigurations remain a leading cause of data breaches. In multicloud environments, this risk is compounded by tool sprawl and inconsistent deployment pipelines.

Solution:

• Infrastructure as Code: Use Terraform to define cloud resources and Open Policy Agent (OPA) for policy-as-code, enforcing security controls early in the delivery lifecycle.
• CI/CD Pipeline Integration: Validate cloud configurations before deployment by integrating security checks into your CI/CD workflows.
• CSPM Integration: Use Cloud Security Posture Management tools to monitor infrastructure and detect drift or insecure configurations post deployment.

🔗 Explore our Cloud Modernisation services to secure and standardise your CI/CD pipelines.

4. Data Protection & Compliance Complexity

Encryption, data residency, and retention policies vary across cloud providers, which introduces significant compliance complexity, especially under frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and POPIA.

Recommended Approach:

• Uniform Encryption Standards: Apply encryption for data in transit and at rest using cloud-native tools (e.g., AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault).
• Data Governance Mapping: Visualise where sensitive data lives and how it flows between services, enabling stronger access controls and audit readiness.
• Metomic for DLP: Discover, classify, and secure sensitive data across platforms using automated data loss prevention tools.

🔗 Assess your Cloud Security posture

5. Cloud-Native Threats & Evolving Attack Surfaces

The use of containers, serverless functions, and APIs introduces ephemeral and distributed attack surfaces that traditional tools struggle to monitor. Without deep observability, cloud-native workloads are vulnerable to runtime threats and lateral movement.

Recommended Approach:

• Cilium + Hubble: Replace standard CNIs with Cilium for advanced networking, and use Hubble for layer 3–7 observability into service-to-service communication.
• Grafana + Prometheus Integration: Visualise metrics from Hubble and application telemetry to monitor DNS requests, latency, and flow maps.
• Confidential Computing: Use secure enclaves to protect sensitive data while it’s being processed (in-use).
• Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP): CNAPPs unify container scanning, runtime protection, and compliance for cloud-native applications.

🔗 Talk to us about Cloud Native Infrastructure Engineering

Multicloud Security Checklist

Final Thoughts: Security is a Moving Target

Securing multicloud environments isn’t a onceoff exercise. It’s a continuous, iterative discipline. As environments become more complex and adversaries more sophisticated, your cloud security strategy must be proactive, adaptive, and embedded across the entire software lifecycle.

IT leaders must empower their teams with the right tooling, processes, and architectural patterns. Whether through Cloud Modernisation, Cloud Cost Optimisation, or a comprehensive Cloud Security Architecture Review, now is the time to take action.

Want to Know If Your Cloud Is Secure Enough? Get a tailored multicloud security review. Click here to schedule a security assessment with our experts.