Cloud Penetration Testing
Cloud penetration testing
Your product runs on someone else’s computers, configured by your team under deadline. We test AWS, Azure and GCP environments the way attackers do: through identity, misconfiguration and the attack surface you forgot was public. Part of Atoro’s penetration testing practice.
Identity-first testing, validated findings, an audit-ready report, and a retest included to confirm the fixes.
Built for modern software companies · Rated 4.8/5 on G2
AWS, Azure and GCP
Identity and access review
Configuration and offensive testing
Retest included
Cloud penetration test
CLOUD
TEST
Identity-firstIAM, trust relationships and the escalation paths between them.
Misconfiguration, verifiedWhat is exploitable, not just what deviates from a benchmark.
External attack surfaceYour environment as the internet actually sees it.
Validated findingsEvery issue verified exploitable and rated by a tester.
Retest includedFixes confirmed, closure evidence provided.
What usually triggers the call
- A customer security review asks how the environment is secured.
- ISO 27001 or SOC 2 evidence needs to cover infrastructure, not just the app.
- The estate has grown fast and nobody has checked what fast left behind.
- A migration or new provider has changed the risk picture.
- Your CSPM dashboard has a thousand items and no verdict.
02 Why this test
Cloud breaches rarely start with an exploit. They start with a setting.
The pattern repeats across almost every public cloud incident: a storage bucket opened for a migration and never closed, an over-privileged role attached to a workload, a credential in a repository, a security group rule nobody remembers writing. The provider’s infrastructure held. The configuration on top of it did not.
That is what makes cloud testing different from traditional infrastructure testing. The perimeter is identity, not network. The question is not whether the data centre is secure. It is whether your IAM policies, your service configuration and your externally visible surface would survive a motivated attacker with a free afternoon.
Client proof
“I loved the more hands-on contact they gave via Slack direct messages.”
Lee Percox, COO, Silktide · 5.0 verified review on Clutch
The engagement: platform, API and entry-network testing for Silktide, with a detailed report of the issues found, their severity and remediation guidance. Read the Silktide case study.
03 Coverage
What the test covers
We test across AWS, Azure and GCP, scoped to the provider and services you actually run.
Identity and access management
The centre of cloud security and the centre of the test. Which identities exist, what they can do, and how far an attacker gets from any single compromised credential. Over-privileged roles, unused permissions, missing MFA on privileged accounts, risky trust relationships and privilege-escalation paths that turn a small foothold into full control of the environment.
Misconfiguration
The dominant real-world cloud risk. Storage exposure, security group and firewall rules, unencrypted services, public snapshots, default settings that were never hardened, and logging or monitoring gaps that would let an intrusion pass unnoticed. We verify what is exploitable, not just what deviates from a benchmark.
External attack surface
What the internet can see of your environment: exposed services, forgotten subdomains, management interfaces, orphaned resources from past experiments. We map it as an outside attacker would, then test what we find.
Secrets and data paths
Credentials in code, in environment configuration, in build pipelines and in places engineers park things to meet a deadline. Then the paths from any exposed secret to data that matters.
Network paths and lateral movement
Flat networks make small compromises large. We map what a foothold actually reaches: security-group chains, peering and transit routes, private endpoints, and the management ports internal convenience left open. Segmentation is tested, not assumed from the architecture diagram.
The measure that matters is blast radius. If one workload credential is stolen, does the attacker get one service or the estate? The report answers that with demonstrated paths, not opinion.
Data stores, snapshots and backups
Databases and storage are where the impact lives, and their copies are where the controls quietly lapse. Public or cross-account snapshot sharing, backup buckets with weaker permissions than the data they duplicate, and encryption that stops at the checkbox because the key policy grants decrypt far too widely.
We follow the data the way an attacker would: not the primary store with the hardened policy, but the export, the snapshot, the analytics copy and the developer dump that nobody rotated out.
CI/CD and the paths into your cloud
Build pipelines hold deploy credentials, and attackers have noticed. We test runner permissions, the trust relationships between your repository platform and your cloud accounts, artefact storage, and the secrets a compromised pipeline could read or quietly ship into production.
The deployment path is part of the environment. An estate with locked-down IAM and a pipeline that can assume an administrator role is one compromised dependency away from losing both.
Containers and serverless
Where you run Kubernetes or managed containers, we test cluster access controls, workload identity, exposed dashboards and APIs, and escape paths from a compromised pod to the wider environment. Where you run serverless, we look at function permissions, event-source trust and the secrets functions carry. The platform changes; the question does not: how far does one foothold reach?
Logging and detection readiness
A penetration test is also a rehearsal: did anything notice us? We review audit-trail coverage across the estate, alerting on identity events such as new access keys, role changes and console logins, and the log retention your compliance story depends on.
Then we tell you what our activity should have triggered and did not. For ISO 27001 and SOC 2 environments this doubles as evidence that monitoring controls operate, not just exist.
The shared-responsibility line, in plain language
Your cloud provider secures the infrastructure: physical facilities, hypervisors, the services themselves. Everything you build and configure on top, identity, workloads, data, network rules, is yours. Our test covers your side of that line, which is where nearly all cloud incidents happen.
What we look for, provider by provider
The risk categories repeat across clouds; the failure modes are provider-specific. Testing is scoped to what you actually run.
AWS
IAM policies and role trust relationships, including cross-account access and the escalation paths between them. S3 exposure at bucket and object level. Security groups and what they actually admit. Instance roles and metadata-service access from workloads.
Azure
Entra ID as the control plane: role assignments, service principals, application permissions and consent grants. Storage account exposure and shared-key access. Network security groups and management-port exposure.
Google Cloud
Project-level IAM bindings and service-account key sprawl, the most common GCP finding class. Storage bucket permissions. Firewall rules, default-network remnants and impersonation chains that quietly cross project boundaries.
Multi-cloud estates are tested as one environment, because an attacker with a foothold in one provider will happily use it to reach another through shared identity, shared secrets or shared pipelines.
A benchmark deviation an attacker cannot use is noted. A chained path from foothold to your data is the headline.
04 Compare
Configuration review or penetration test?
| Cloud configuration review | Cloud penetration test |
|---|---|
| Audits settings against good practice, service by service | Attacks the environment to show what a real intruder achieves |
| Breadth: full coverage of the estate’s configuration | Depth: chained attack paths from foothold to impact |
| Output: prioritised misconfiguration findings | Output: demonstrated attack paths with proof |
| Right for building a hardening baseline | Right for testing whether the baseline actually holds |
They answer different questions and pair well: review to raise the floor, test to prove the ceiling. Scoping tells you honestly which your situation needs first, and many engagements combine both. The application running on this infrastructure has its own page: web application penetration testing. To test the whole product as one scope, see SaaS penetration testing.
05 Why Atoro
Why software companies test with Atoro
Identity-first.
We test where cloud environments actually fall: IAM, trust relationships and escalation paths, not just a benchmark scan with a new logo.
Human-validated. Always.
Every finding is verified exploitable and severity-rated by a tester in your environment’s context.
Engineering-led.
Your environment is infrastructure-as-code, pipelines and managed services. So is our testers’ frame of reference.
Audit-fluent.
Findings map to the control story your ISO 27001 or SOC 2 audit and your customer reviewers expect, in one report.
06 Plan
A managed test from scoping to retest
We run the engagement with clear scoping, a defined testing window, and support before and after the test.
1
Scope
We agree providers, accounts, services and the testing model (external, credentialed or both), then fix the price.
2
Test
Manual testing of identity, configuration and external surface, tool-assisted for coverage, human-driven for attack paths.
3
Validate
Every candidate finding verified for real exploitability and rated for severity in your environment’s context.
4
Report
Validated findings with evidence, demonstrated attack paths, impact and remediation guidance.
5
Remediate
We walk your team through the fixes, in your terms: policy changes, configuration and infrastructure-as-code.
6
Retest
Once fixed, we confirm it, with closure evidence for your audit or customer.
07 Deliverables
What you receive
Every engagement is scoped first and priced to what it covers. You get the number before any agreement, usually on the first call.
Included
Scoping
A clear view of what is in scope, what is out, and what the test needs to prove.
Included
Expert penetration test
Manual and tool-assisted testing by experienced security professionals.
Included
Human validation
Findings reviewed, prioritised, and explained by testers, not exported from a scanner.
Included
Audit-ready report
Structured for engineering teams, auditors, and customer security reviews.
Included
Remediation support
Help for your team to understand and close the findings.
Included
Retest included
Confirms fixes and provides closure evidence.
No raw scanner output sold as a pen test. No vulnerability dump with no priorities. No report that leaves your engineers guessing.
08 Compliance
Evidence for ISO 27001 and SOC 2
Cloud infrastructure testing completes the evidence picture that application testing starts. For ISO 27001 it supports technical vulnerability management (Annex A 8.8) and the cloud-services controls of the 2022 revision; for SOC 2 it evidences vulnerability identification across the environment your product actually runs in.
Customer security reviews increasingly ask about the cloud environment by name, and a current test is the strongest answer available.
09 FAQ
Cloud penetration testing FAQs
Do you need our cloud credentials, and how is access handled safely?
For credentialed testing we ask for scoped, time-limited, read-appropriate access created for the engagement and revoked at the end, never shared personal credentials. External-only testing needs no access at all. Access handling is agreed in scoping and documented in the rules of engagement.
Do cloud providers allow penetration testing?
Yes. AWS, Azure and GCP all permit customers to test their own workloads within published policies, without prior approval for standard testing. We stay inside those policies and handle any provider-specific conditions as part of scoping.
Configuration review versus penetration test, which do we need?
A configuration review gives breadth: every setting checked against good practice. A penetration test gives depth: proof of what an attacker chains together. If you have never assessed the environment, the review usually comes first; if you need to demonstrate resilience to customers or auditors, the test carries more weight. Many clients combine both in one engagement.
Do you cover AWS, Azure and GCP equally?
Yes. The engagement is scoped to the providers and services you run, and multi-cloud environments are tested as one estate, because attackers treat them as one.
How is this different from what our CSPM tool reports?
A CSPM tool compares configuration against benchmarks continuously, which is valuable and worth keeping. It cannot chain findings into attack paths, judge exploitability in your context or test what the internet sees of you. The test validates which of those thousand dashboard items actually matter, and finds what the tool cannot see.
Does this produce evidence for ISO 27001 or SOC 2?
Yes. Findings are mapped to the relevant control story, and the retest provides closure evidence. The same report serves your auditor, your customer’s security team and your platform engineers.
Can testing break anything in our environment?
The rules of engagement exclude destructive techniques, and testing is designed to demonstrate access, not disrupt service. Where a finding could only be proven by something risky, we stop, document the path and agree next steps with you rather than taking the risk.
We only use one cloud provider, does that change the scope?
It simplifies it, and usually reduces the price. Single-provider environments still hold the same risk categories, identity, misconfiguration and external exposure, so the test covers the same ground with a tighter boundary. Scoping reflects exactly what you run.
10 Push
Request cloud testing pricing
Tell us what you run and where. You get a clear scope and a fixed quote before any agreement, usually on the first call.
No raw scan sold as a pen test. No vague “starting from” proposal. No report your engineers cannot use.
We’ll review
What the test is for: product security, ISO 27001, SOC 2, customer review, or a deal
The systems, applications, APIs, and infrastructure in scope
Your timeline and any audit or customer deadline
The reporting format your reviewer or internal team needs
The remediation and retest process
The frameworks you may need next