Tenable released its 2025 Cloud Security Risk Report, which revealed that 9 percent of publicly accessible cloud storage contains sensitive data. Ninety-seven percent of such data is restricted or confidential, creating easy and prime targets for threat actors.
Cloud environments face dramatically increased risk due to exposed sensitive data, misconfigurations, underlying vulnerabilities and poorly stored secrets – such as passwords, API keys and credentials. The 2025 Cloud Security Risk Report provides a deep dive into the most prominent cloud security issues impacting data, identity, workload and AI resources and offers practical mitigation strategies to help organisations proactively reduce risk and close critical gaps.

Key Findings From The Report Include:
- Secrets found in diverse cloud resources, putting organisations at risk: Over half of organisations (54 percent) store at least one secret directly in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Container Service (ECS) task definitions, creating a direct attack path. Similar issues were found among organisations using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Run (52 percent) and Microsoft Azure Logic Apps workflows (31 percent). Alarmingly, 3.5 percent of all AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances contain secrets in user data — major risk given how widely EC2 is used.
- Cloud workload security is improving, but toxic combinations persist: While the number of organisations with a “toxic cloud trilogy” – a workload that is publicly exposed, critically vulnerable, and highly privileged – has decreased from 38 percent to 29 percent, this dangerous combination still represents a significant and common risk.
- Using Identity Providers (IdPs) alone doesn’t eliminate risk: While 83 percent of AWS organisations are exercising best practices in using IdP services to manage their cloud identities, overly permissive defaults, excessive entitlements, and standing permissions still expose them to identity-based threats.

“Despite the security incidents we have witnessed over the past few years, organisations continue to leave critical cloud assets, from sensitive data to secrets, exposed through avoidable misconfigurations,” said Ari Eitan, Director of Cloud Security Research, Tenable.
“The path for attackers is often simple: exploit public access, steal embedded secrets or abuse overprivileged identities. To close these gaps, security teams need full visibility across their environments and the ability to prioritise and automate remediation before threats escalate. The cloud demands continuous, proactive risk management, and not reactive patchwork.”
The report reflects findings by the Tenable Cloud Research team based on telemetry from workloads across diverse public cloud and enterprise environments, analysed from October 2024 through March 2025.
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