The 2020 State of Cloud (In)Security

Zscaler ThreatLabZ analyzed telemetry from hundreds of thousands of cloud workloads and found pervasive misconfigurations—notably 63% of users lacking MFA, 50% not rotating access keys, 92% of storage buckets without access logging, ~26% of hosts exposing SSH and ~20% exposing RDP—that materially increase compromise risk. The report highlights four primary failure areas (logging/monitoring, excessive permissions, storage/encryption, and network security groups) and recommends pragmatic mitigations such as enabling persistent logging and alerts, enforcing MFA and key rotation, encrypting storage and backups, applying least-privilege access, restricting inbound/outbound network rules, and moving toward ZTNA to eliminate external attack surface.