Weak passwords, missing two-factor authentication, and misconfigured sharing settings are the primary vectors for data breaches in cloud environments used by SMEs.
AI agents fail to recognize social engineering phishing because they do not separate data paths from control paths and do not verify identities, though they partially detect technical attacks.
Just-In-Time Access replaces permanent access with automatically expiring time-limited permissions and reduces the exploitation window for compromised cloud identities from months to hours.
Zero Trust must be decentralized in cloud environments: trust decisions occur directly at identities, workloads, and data streams, no longer at central boundaries.
A combination of configuration errors in cloud identity and secrets management enables complete system compromise even from individual integration failures.
