Top 10 cloud security tips and best practices for 2025

This year’s cloud security recommendations look slightly different from previous years. There are two key reasons for this:

• New technologies like GenAI and agentic apps have emerged. 

• Attackers are using more sophisticated techniques to exploit cloud assets and evade detection.

For example, what used to be basic, easy-to-spot phishing has now become extensive vishing and deep-fake campaigns that even technical experts fall for. 

To stay ahead of 2025’s threats, the following cloud security best practices are essential.

Cloud security consists of the controls, policies, and technologies implemented for protecting cloud environments from threats. This includes data, services, applications, configurations, and GenAI models in the cloud.

As access to technology has democratized how threat actors launch attacks, cloud security has taken on new meaning and is no longer solely about defense. 

With cutting-edge tools that often rival many organizations’ defenses at attackers’ disposal, proactive prevention is a must.

Implementing the following recommendations will increase the security of your cloud assets and enhance your overall security posture.

1. Understand the shared responsibility model

Traditionally, CSPs (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) handle securing your underlying cloud infrastructure and managed services. You, as the customer, need to secure everything running in the cloud (data, applications, configurations, etc.). 

However, with the arrival of GenAI, companies now also have to worry about safeguarding AI data and AI models. 

Tips: 

• Understand and embrace your roles as specified by your provider.

• Establish explicit agreements with providers and supply chain vendors to ensure the integrity of third-party assets.

• Facilitate shared accountability.

2. Prioritize AI security 

New technologies come with unknown risks, and adopting them without proper safeguards is an invitation to attack. 

Tips:

• Use software composition analysis (SCA) to detect and block vulnerable AI packages to eliminate backdoors that hackers could exploit to attack your cloud environment.

• Protect your AI training data, model tuning pipelines, and inference endpoints with encryption, strict access controls, and AI-specific guardrails (e.g., model drift detection).

• Verify provider-enforced tenant isolation to safeguard your AI workloads from multi-tenant risks like data leakage and unauthorized access.

• Continuously monitor model behavior to spot common AI risks such as model poisoning and compromised AI APIs. 

• Implement input/output validation using dedicated filtering tools (e.g., NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails) to block prompt injection, data exfiltration, and similar attacks.

3. Adopt shift-left security

Shift-left security is the practice of securing cloud-native applications and APIs from the development phase. This dramatically reduces your threat footprint and remediation costs.

Tips: 

• Embrace secure coding; integrate automated security and compliance checks (triggered at every pull request or commit) into the CI pipeline; this instantly flags and resolves vulnerable or non-compliant code before it goes live. 

• Use secure container images from trusted sources; scanning for vulnerabilities enhances runtime security and minimizes potential attacker entry points. 

• Store secrets securely (e.g., in HashiCorp Vault) and embed secret detection into developer workflows to uncover hardcoded secrets; this prevents threat actors from gaining a foothold in your cloud environment via exposed secrets.

• Shield-right as you shift-left, e.g., by enforcing real-time monitoring to detect any blind spots early; this helps deter hackers, who thrive on missed vulnerabilities. 

4. Manage identity and access with least privilege and zero trust 

Embrace centralized identity and access management (IAM), defining policies that govern who can access what.

Tips:

• Implement least privilege (e.g., via RBAC and ABAC), ensuring only essential human and machine identities can access cloud and AI workloads. 

• Adopt a zero trust architecture, segmenting workloads and continuously verifying access rights with MFA, within and outside your network perimeter.

• Regularly review access rights to revoke unnecessary permissions.

5. Harden configurations

Cloud assets, AI workloads, networks, and identities are all pretty easy to misconfigure—making them top causes of breaches. 

Tips: 

• Validate IaC templates to eliminate security risks before code is shipped. 

• Continuously assess cloud configurations to resolve publicly exposed assets fast.

• Autonomously enforce security policies with PaC for consistent security and compliance across hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. 

• Enforce timely patching with automated patch management tools to fix vulnerabilities before they become attack vectors. 

• Regularly audit firewall rules to spot misconfigurations that could compromise your cloud resources and networks.

6. Address shadow IT 

Shadow IT elements (e.g., unsanctioned VMs, data, APIs, and GPUs) are top security risks because they evade centralized governance and monitoring.

Tips: 

• Establish policies that balance security with productivity to eliminate the need to bypass centralized security. 

• Automatically block unauthorized deployments from the source, using policies that require resources to be provisioned solely through approved templates.

• Continuously monitor data flows to discover and resolve shadow IT. 

7. Embrace real-time monitoring, detection, and response

Continuous monitoring spots threats and anomalies, such as unusual login patterns or configuration changes, before full-blown attacks occur.

Tips:

• Track user behavior in real time to spot lateral movement, model misuse, and other early warning signs of attacks. 

• Predict and prevent potential threats by using AI-powered analytics. 

• Map external exposures to real-world attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) using frameworks like MITRE.

8. Encrypt data

Encrypting data and storing encryption keys securely keeps data undecipherable in the event of a breach. However, with the rise of AI and edge computing, you need more than encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest (AES).

Tips:

• Leverage confidential computing techniques like hardware-enforced trusted execution environments (TEEs) for encryption in use (during processing, e.g., for AI model training).

• Future-proof your data with quantum-resistant cryptography, like hash or code-based cryptography.

9. Automate compliance management

Regulatory standards change frequently as technologies and security risks evolve. Companies must stay on top of their compliance posture. 

Tips: 

• Use automated compliance management tools that keep up with evolving frameworks, including AI-specific standards like the NIST AI RMF and EU AI Act, as well as new policies from PCI DSS, NIST, etc. 

• Maintain regular audit trails to provide audit-ready proof demonstrating your compliance with regulatory bodies and customers.

10. Incident management

Having incident management procedures, including prevention and response playbooks, means teams are not left scrambling when incidents happen, i.e., when tensions are usually high and mistakes costly.

Tips:

• Automate incident response with tools that offer autonomous context-based remediation and AI-augmented playbooks; this shortens the compromise-to-containment window.

• Educate teams on how to secure software development, safeguard third-party component usage, and deal with AI-powered phishing campaigns.

Security breaches are costly, with the average figure now standing at $4.44 million, according to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report. This number can go even higher due to outages, lawsuits, fines, and bad press. 

The cloud security best practices discussed in this post will help you stay ahead of 2025’s threat landscape and avoid unwanted impacts on your bottom line. 

AlgoSec can help. Designed to simplify robust cloud security in 2025 and beyond, it offers a suite of tools for cloud network security, cloud security and compliance, zero trust implementation, firewall management, incident response, and more. 

Get started on improving your cloud security. Sign up for a demo of AlgoSec today.