Cloud Penetration Testing (AWS, Azure, and GCP)

How Cloud Testing Differs From Traditional Testing

In a traditional network, most findings are exploitable software flaws. In the cloud, most findings are configuration and identity mistakes: an over-permissive role, a public storage bucket, an exposed management interface, or disabled logging. Cloud penetration testing is therefore identity-centric and configuration-aware. It asks what a given set of credentials or a misconfigured resource actually allows, and how an attacker would chain those mistakes into access to sensitive data.

What Cloud Penetration Testing Covers

A cloud engagement examines the parts of the environment you are responsible for securing, including:

• Identity and access management: roles, policies, privilege escalation paths, and unused permissions
• Storage exposure: public buckets, blobs, and snapshots that leak data
• Network controls: security groups, exposed management ports, and internet-facing services
• Secrets management: keys and credentials embedded in code, images, or configuration
• Serverless and container configuration, and logging and monitoring gaps

The Shared Responsibility Model

Cloud providers secure the infrastructure; you secure what you put on it. Penetration testing focuses on your side of that line: your identities, configurations, applications, and data. Because you are testing services you do not physically own, engagements are scoped to respect each provider's testing policy, and Grid32 confirms authorization before testing begins. Reviewing least-privilege access is often the highest-impact part of the work.

Common Cloud Findings

Across cloud engagements the same issues recur: storage left publicly readable, identity roles far broader than they need to be, management consoles and APIs reachable from the internet, secrets committed into repositories, and logging turned off so an intrusion would go unseen. None require an exploit, which is why a configuration-aware test finds them where a purely exploit-focused test would not. See our guide to cloud security misconfigurations for the details.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is cloud penetration testing?

Cloud penetration testing assesses the security of your cloud environment across identity and access, storage, network configuration, secrets, and logging. Because most cloud breaches come from misconfiguration and over-permissive identities rather than software exploits, it is configuration-aware and identity-centric, proving what a given misconfiguration or credential actually allows.

Can you penetration test AWS, Azure, or GCP?

Yes. Grid32 tests environments across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, scoped to the customer side of the shared responsibility model and to each provider's testing policy. Authorization is confirmed before testing begins.

What are the most common cloud vulnerabilities?

The most common are publicly exposed storage, over-permissive identity and access roles, internet-facing management interfaces, secrets embedded in code or images, and disabled logging. These are configuration mistakes rather than software flaws, which is why cloud testing focuses on how they chain into access to sensitive data.