Cloud Entitlement Risk: A Silent Threat to Cloud Security Investments
A recent study by IBM reveals that the average cost of a data breach reached USD 4.88 million in 2024, with public cloud environment breaches carrying costs elevated above on-premises incidents.
The gap between approved cloud security policy and actual cloud permission reality creates exposure that amplifies breach cost and regulatory liability.
Cloud entitlement risk represents the gap between what leadership believes cloud identities can do and what cloud permissions actually allow. This gap exists in nearly every cloud environment due to development speed, template-driven deployment, service account provisioning, and other structural conditions of cloud operations.
The problem is not limited to a single overprivileged identity being compromised, but rather a low-privilege identity that holds a quiet path to escalate itself through permissive role assumption policies or overly broad IAM write permissions.