A cloud security audit is an independent review of how your cloud environment is configured, measured against a recognised standard. We examine identity, network, encryption, logging and firewall posture across your AWS accounts, then hand you a report that says what is broken, how serious each item is, and what to fix first. HAZERCLOUD is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and is itself ISO 27001:2022 certified.
Evidence-based, not opinion-based.
Breaches rarely come from exotic attacks. They come from an over-permissive role, a security group someone opened for a demo, or logging that was never switched on. These are the six areas we work through, and the order reflects where real findings cluster.
IAM users, roles and policies reviewed for least privilege. Wildcard permissions, unused credentials, missing MFA, long-lived access keys, over-broad cross-account trust, and root account usage. This is where the highest-severity findings almost always are, which is why we start here rather than at the network edge.
VPC layout, subnet placement, security groups and NACLs. What is reachable from the internet and whether it should be: public buckets, internet-facing databases, management ports open to the world, and load balancer TLS configuration. We map the attack surface from the outside in, the way an attacker would enumerate it.
Encryption at rest across EBS, RDS, S3 and snapshots, and encryption in transit at every hop. KMS key policies, rotation, and who can actually decrypt what. Unencrypted backups are a common finding: the primary volume is protected while the snapshot sitting beside it is not.
CloudTrail coverage across regions and accounts, log retention and tamper resistance, VPC flow logs, GuardDuty and Security Hub enablement, and whether anyone is actually alerted when something fires. Logs nobody reads are not detection, and an alert with no owner is not a control.
Security group and NACL rule review, AWS WAF configuration where it exists, and rule sets that have accumulated over years. A firewall security audit is mostly the disciplined removal of rules that no longer have an owner or a reason, which is unglamorous and consistently valuable.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, Route 53 configuration, dangling DNS entries that invite subdomain takeover, and certificate expiry. An email security audit belongs here because domain spoofing does not require any access to your cloud account at all, and it is routinely the cheapest gap to close.
An audit only means something if it measures you against something external. We assess against two reference points at once, so the output is useful to your engineers and to your auditor without being rewritten for either.
If you want to run this yourself, this is the sequence we use. The order matters: inventory drives scope, and scope drives everything after it. Skipping straight to a scanner is the most common way an audit produces noise instead of decisions.
List every AWS account, region and running resource from the API, not from an org chart. Most teams find something here: a forgotten test account, an old region with live instances, a service nobody owns. You cannot audit what you have not enumerated.
CloudTrail in all regions, Config recording, VPC flow logs, GuardDuty, Security Hub, IAM Access Analyzer. If these are off, switch them on and let them collect. An audit against an account with no history sees the snapshot but not the behaviour.
Pull every IAM user, role, policy and access key. Look for wildcards, unused credentials, absent MFA, and any role that can escalate to administrator. Identity findings are usually the highest severity, so they come before the network work rather than after it.
Enumerate what is publicly reachable: open security groups, public buckets, internet-facing databases, exposed management ports, and DNS records pointing at resources that no longer exist. Compare that against what should be reachable. The gap is your attack surface.
Confirm encryption at rest and in transit, then check the key policies behind it. Include backups and snapshots, which are routinely left unencrypted while the primary volume is fine. Verify retention and deletion actually happen rather than existing only in a policy document.
Score each finding by exploitability and blast radius, not by how alarming a scanner made it look. A public bucket of marketing images is not a public bucket of customer records. Without this step you hand the team a list they cannot prioritise, and nothing gets fixed.
Every finding needs an owner, a concrete fix and a position in the queue. Separate the configuration changes that ship this week from the work needing an architecture decision, so the team clears easy wins instead of stalling on hard ones. Then re-test to confirm the fix held.
One report that works for three audiences without being rewritten: your engineers, your leadership, and your auditor.
Every issue scored by exploitability and blast radius, with the evidence behind it: the policy document, the rule, the log line. No unexplained scanner output, and no padding the count with informational noise to make the report look thorough.
An ordered plan separating configuration changes that can ship this week from work that needs an architecture decision. Each item names what to change and why it matters, so an engineer who was not in the audit can pick it up and act on it.
Findings mapped to ISO 27001 control areas and the Well-Architected Security pillar, with the remediation trail attached. This is what shortens a certification conversation, because the questions an auditor asks are already answered in writing.
The audit is deliberately independent of the remediation and priced separately, so the findings stay honest. If you want us to do the work as well, these are the routes.
Closing the configuration findings and putting guardrails in the pipeline so the same issues do not come back: IAM baselines, infrastructure as code policy checks, image scanning, and secrets handling.
DevSecOps servicesWhere the audit says a weakness exists, penetration testing proves whether it is genuinely exploitable. Useful when you need to show a board or a customer real risk rather than a theoretical one.
VAPT and penetration testingThis audit covers the cloud environment. If the risk lives in your own code, APIs or mobile apps, that is the application layer and it is assessed separately, including source code review.
Application security assessmentAn audit is a snapshot. If nobody is watching afterwards, drift starts the next day. CloudOps covers 24/7 monitoring, incident response and patching under SLA.
CloudOps and managed servicesIf your question is not here, ask it on the call. We would rather scope honestly than sell an audit you do not need.
Bring your AWS environment and we will look at it with you. If the obvious gaps are things your team can close in a week, we will say so. If a full audit is warranted, you get a fixed scope and a fixed quote before anything starts.
★ AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner · ISO 27001:2022 · ISO 9001:2015
