Twenty Years of Cloud Security Research

This article surveys two decades of cloud security evolution, describing four eras — the Foundational era (2006–2016) when core controls and logging emerged, the CSPM era (2016–2021) of posture tooling and open-source detection, the CNAPP era (2021–2025) driven by integrated vendor platforms and high-profile cloud vulnerabilities, and the nascent AI era (2025–) where AI accelerates both attacker and defender capabilities. The piece highlights key milestones, tooling, research talks, and example vulnerabilities to illustrate how complexity and risk have shifted over time, but it is an analytical retrospective rather than a technical incident or threat intelligence report.