12 Best Practices for Securing AWS Cloud in 2026

**Executive summary:** This Qualys whitepaper outlines how AWS cloud security in 2026 requires continuous, risk-based governance across identity, configuration, workloads, and compliance, summarizes common challenges (IAM sprawl, fragmented visibility, ephemeral workloads), and prescribes 12 best practices — including least-privilege IAM, continuous asset discovery, encryption-by-default, API protection, network segmentation, continuous logging, IaC policy enforcement, secrets management, continuous vulnerability management, container/Kubernetes hardening, supply chain security, and AI workload protection — while positioning Qualys TotalCloud as a unified platform to prioritize and remediate cloud risks.