Here's a stat that should concern every organization running cloud workloads: misconfigurations are the leading cause of cloud breaches. Not sophisticated zero-day attacks. Not nation-state adversaries. Misconfigurations — an S3 bucket left public, an IAM role with admin privileges assigned to a service that doesn't need them, a security group that allows SSH from 0.0.0.0/0, logging that was never turned on.

The cloud shared responsibility model means your provider secures the infrastructure, but everything above the hypervisor — your configurations, your identities, your data, your applications — is your responsibility. And the speed at which cloud environments change makes it remarkably easy for misconfigurations to creep in. A developer spins up a test instance with overly permissive access. An automation script creates resources without encryption. A network rule gets modified during troubleshooting and never gets reverted.

InTechsters provides cloud security hardening services that systematically identify and remediate these risks across your AWS, Azure, and GCP environments. We don't just run a scanner and hand you a report. We assess your cloud posture holistically — identity, network, data, compute, logging, and compliance — and implement the controls that actually reduce your risk.

What We Harden

Identity & Access Management (IAM)

IAM misconfigurations are the single most common path to cloud compromise. We assess and harden your identity layer thoroughly:

IAM Policy Review & Least-Privilege Enforcement — Audit of all IAM users, roles, groups, and policies to eliminate excessive permissions, unused credentials, and overly broad access.

Service Account & Non-Human Identity Hardening —Review of service accounts, machine identities, cross-account roles, and API keys — often the most overlooked and overprivileged identities in cloud environments.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Enforcement — Ensuring MFA is enforced for all human identities, especially privileged accounts, console access, and federated logins.

Privilege Escalation Path Analysis — Identifying paths where a lower-privilege identity could escalate to administrative access through role chaining, policy combinations, or trust relationships.

Federation & SSO Configuration Review — Assessment of identity federation setups, SAML/OIDC configurations, and single sign-on implementations for security weaknesses.

Access Key Rotation & Credential Hygiene — Identifying stale access keys, long-lived credentials, and secrets stored in code or environment variables.

Network Security

Security Group & Network ACL Audit — Review of all inbound and outbound rules for overly permissive access, unnecessary port exposure, and violations of least-privilege networking.

VPC / VNet Architecture & Segmentation — Evaluation of virtual network architecture, subnet segmentation, routing tables, and traffic flows to ensure proper isolation between workloads, environments, and trust zones.

Private Endpoint & Service Endpoint Configuration — Ensuring that cloud services communicate over private networks rather than traversing the public internet.

WAF & DDoS Protection — Configuration review and optimization of Web Application Firewalls (AWS WAF, Azure WAF, Cloud Armor) and DDoS protection services.

DNS Security — Assessment of Route 53 / Azure DNS / Cloud DNS configurations, DNSSEC implementation, and DNS-based data exfiltration risks.

Egress Filtering & Network Monitoring — Ensuring outbound traffic is controlled and monitored to detect data exfiltration, command-and-control communication, and unauthorized external connectivity.

Data Protection

Encryption at Rest & In Transit — Validation that all data stores, databases, file systems, and storage services use encryption, with proper key management and TLS enforcement for data in transit.

Key Management Configuration — Review of AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, and GCP Cloud KMS configurations — key rotation policies, access controls, and separation of duties.

Storage Bucket & Blob Security — Assessment of S3 buckets, Azure Blob containers, and GCS buckets for public exposure, overly permissive ACLs, and missing encryption.

Database Security Configuration — Hardening of cloud-native databases (RDS, Azure SQL, Cloud SQL, DynamoDB, Cosmos DB) including public accessibility, authentication settings, backup encryption, and audit logging.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) — Configuration of cloud-native DLP capabilities to detect and prevent unauthorized movement or exposure of sensitive data.

Logging, Monitoring & Detection

Audit Logging Enablement — Ensuring comprehensive logging is enabled across your environment — AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity Logs, GCP Cloud Audit Logs — with tamper-proof storage and appropriate retention.

Security Monitoring Configuration — Setup and optimization of cloud-native security services — AWS GuardDuty, Azure Defender / Microsoft Defender for Cloud, GCP Security Command Center.

Alerting & Notification — Configuration of real-time alerting for security-critical events including unauthorized API calls, root account usage, IAM changes, and resource exposure.

Flow Logs & Traffic Analysis — Enabling VPC Flow Logs, NSG Flow Logs, and VPC Flow Logs for network traffic visibility and anomaly detection.

Compute & Workload Security

Instance & VM Hardening — Assessment of EC2, Azure VM, and Compute Engine instances for security group exposure, unpatched operating systems, unnecessary services, and hardening against CIS Benchmarks.

Container & Kubernetes Security — Review of ECS, EKS, AKS, GKE configurations for RBAC policies, network policies, image security, secrets management, and pod security standards.

Serverless Security — Assessment of Lambda, Azure Functions, and Cloud Functions for overly permissive execution roles, injection risks, dependency vulnerabilities, and event source security.

Image & AMI Security — Scanning of machine images, container images, and golden AMIs for embedded vulnerabilities, malware, and misconfigurations.

Compliance & Governance

CIS Benchmark Assessment — Automated and manual assessment against CIS Benchmarks for AWS, Azure, and GCP — the industry-standard baseline for cloud configuration security.

AWS Well-Architected Security Review — Evaluation against the Security Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Azure Security Benchmark Assessment — Assessment against Microsoft's Azure Security Benchmark for configuration best practices.

Regulatory Compliance Mapping — Cloud configuration assessment mapped to SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, GDPR, and other applicable frameworks.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) — Implementation or optimization of CSPM tooling for continuous, automated monitoring of your cloud configuration against security baselines.

Tagging & Resource Governance — Establishing tagging standards and governance policies for asset inventory, cost allocation, and security policy enforcement.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security Review — Assessment of Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM Templates, and Pulumi code for security misconfigurations before they're deployed to production.

Our Approach

We don't just hand you a list of 500 findings and say "good luck." Our hardening engagements include:

Cloud Security Assessment — Comprehensive evaluation of your environment across all security domains.

Risk-Prioritized Findings — Every finding is ranked by actual risk — considering exploitability, exposure, blast radius, and business impact — not just technical severity.

Remediation Execution — We can implement fixes directly, or guide your team through remediation with detailed, step-by-step instructions.

Validation & Retesting — After remediation, we validate that changes are effective and haven't introduced new issues.

Continuous Monitoring Recommendations — We help you set up ongoing posture monitoring so your environment doesn't drift back into an insecure state.

Cloud Platforms We Harden

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — IAM, VPC, S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, EKS, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, KMS, and the full AWS service ecosystem.

Microsoft Azure — Azure AD, NSG, Virtual Networks, Azure SQL, Azure Storage, AKS, Azure Functions, Defender for Cloud, Key Vault, and Azure services.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — Cloud IAM, VPC, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, GKE, Cloud Functions, Security Command Center, Cloud KMS, and GCP services.

Multi-Cloud — Unified hardening across environments spanning multiple providers.

Frequently Asked Questions

We passed our cloud provider's security check. Doesn't that mean we're secure?

Cloud provider security checks cover basic hygiene but they don't assess your specific configuration in the context of your business, your data, and your regulatory requirements. A clean provider health check and a secure cloud environment are not the same thing.

How long does cloud hardening take?

A typical hardening engagement takes 2–4 weeks for assessment and prioritized findings, with remediation running in parallel or immediately following. For larger or multi-account environments, we scope accordingly.

Will hardening changes break anything in production?

We assess every change for operational impact before implementation. High-risk changes are tested in non-production environments first, and we implement changes in coordinated windows with your team. Breaking production is not an acceptable outcome — we treat it accordingly.

Can you harden a multi-cloud environment?

YYes. We regularly work with organizations running workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously. We assess each platform individually and also evaluate cross-cloud trust relationships, identity federation, and network connectivity.