Cloud Security Vulnerabilities: Why Major Providers Still Face Risks in Multi-Cloud Environments

Rising cloud vulnerability rates have set off alarm bells across the tech industry, as new research exposes glaring differences in cybersecurity posture among the world’s largest public cloud providers. According to a recent report by CyCognito, revealed in depth by HackRead, Google Cloud and several prominent smaller cloud platforms are outpacing Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure when it comes to the proportion of exposed and vulnerable assets—a sobering reality for security professionals concerned with their attack surface in the multi-cloud era.

The Cloud Vulnerability Landscape: A Data-Driven View​

Today’s organizations are more reliant than ever on cloud environments to run everything from customer-facing applications to mission-critical databases. As this footprint has exploded, so too has the opportunity for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to go unnoticed—and, critically, unaddressed. The CyCognito study analyzed almost five million internet-facing assets across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and a collection of other hosting providers. Its findings paint a nuanced but distinctly troubling picture of the current cloud security climate.

Google Cloud and Smaller Providers Show Significantly Higher Vulnerability Rates​

The most eye-popping metric from CyCognito's research concerns the overall percentage of assets found to have at least one security issue. Google Cloud leads the pack uncomfortably, with 38% of its internet-exposed assets showing vulnerabilities. This is more than twice the rate found on AWS (15%) and well above Azure (27%). These figures were directly confirmed in the HackRead summary and align with CyCognito’s published dataset, lending them strong credibility.
Interestingly, smaller cloud providers such as Oracle Cloud, DigitalOcean, and Linode matched Google Cloud’s percentage, while hosting giants GoDaddy, Hetzner, and DreamHost weren’t far behind at 33%. This correlation between provider size (outside the “big three”) and higher vulnerability rates raises red flags about the relative maturity of security practices in non-major clouds.

Table: Vulnerable Asset Rates by Provider​

Provider Category	% with Any Vulnerability
Google Cloud	38%
AWS	15%
Azure	27%
Oracle/DigitalOcean/Linode	38%
GoDaddy/Hetzner/DreamHost	33%

Verified via CyCognito’s research reported by HackRead.

Critical Vulnerabilities: Azure Edges Out the Competition—But Not in a Good Way​

Diving deeper, CyCognito classified “critical” issues using the industry standard CVSS score of 9.0 or higher. At this level, Azure surprisingly surpassed both AWS and Google Cloud with a critical vulnerability rate of 0.07%. Both AWS and Google Cloud tied at 0.04% each. While these tiny percentages may initially seem insignificant, the vast scale of public cloud means they reflect hundreds—perhaps thousands—of assets with potentially catastrophic exposures.
What is perhaps more worrying is that among non-major cloud providers, the prevalence of critical vulnerabilities shot up to 0.5% (verified in the HackRead report and supported by CyCognito’s own data). Major hosting companies were also elevated, with 0.32% affected by critical issues.

Easy Exploits: Smaller Providers Fare Worst, Google Cloud Lags Behind AWS and Azure​

Not all vulnerabilities are created equal—some require significant attacker resources or knowledge, while others are practically an open door. CyCognito’s report made a key distinction by identifying “easily exploitable” flaws, factoring in real-world attacker behavior.

• On smaller cloud providers, 13% of assets contained flaws that CyCognito classifies as easy for threat actors to exploit.
• Major hosting providers also fared poorly, hovering at 10%.
• Among the leading hyperscalers, Google Cloud again fared the worst, with 5.35% of its assets at risk, compared to AWS at 1.98% and Azure at 2.37%.

This suggests that not only are more assets on Google Cloud and smaller providers vulnerable, but also a higher fraction of those weaknesses can be quickly and reliably leveraged by attackers—a dangerous combination.

The Overlap: Double Jeopardy for Some Providers​

Perhaps most alarming is the category where vulnerabilities are both critical and easy to exploit. While less than 0.1% of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud assets fall into this red zone, the figure for smaller cloud platforms and hosting companies rises to 0.3% and 0.25% respectively. Extrapolated over millions of assets, these small-percentage vulnerabilities represent a substantial attack surface.

Reasons for the Risk Gap​

The Security Maturity Divide​

One recurring theme across these statistics is the role that platform maturity and investment in security tooling appear to play. AWS, long dominant in the cloud space, has poured resources into developing secure defaults, robust perimeter controls, and automated misconfiguration detection. Azure, in close competition, has made similar investments, although its marginally higher critical vulnerability rate signals that security at scale remains elusive, even for titans.
Smaller providers and hosting companies, by contrast, may not have the scale, engineering resources, or market pressure to harden their platforms to the same degree. This chasm reflects not only in the raw frequency of vulnerabilities but in the likelihood that issues linger unpatched or unremediated for longer periods.

Multi-Cloud Complexity and “Shadow IT”​

A second critical factor—cited by both CyCognito and Palo Alto Networks—is the growing complexity of multi-cloud footprints. As organizations scatter applications, test environments, and development workloads across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and beyond, security teams often lose sight of their true digital footprint. Assets that aren’t tracked internally may be left out of vulnerability scans, misconfiguration checks, or regular patching cycles. CyCognito refers to this as the phenomenon of “shadow IT”—infrastructure set up outside official channels but publicly reachable online.
This aligns with Palo Alto Networks’ report of a 388% year-over-year spike in cloud security alerts, a figure widely corroborated by industry security dashboards and the increasing volume of high-profile cloud breaches. It’s a stark signal that traditional asset inventory tools—and dated, documentation-centric approaches—are failing to keep pace.

Critical Analysis: Weighing Strengths and Shortcomings​

Strengths of Major Cloud Providers​

• Better Baseline Security: The statistics strongly suggest that, on average, AWS and Azure offer a more secure default operating environment. Users benefit from advanced security automation, visibility tools, integrated policy checks, and prompt notification of unsafe configurations.
• Continuous Improvement: High levels of vendor investment and a feedback loop from massive enterprise customers push enhancements in both platform design and response procedures.
• Public Transparency: Incidents and vulnerabilities are often publicized, scrutinized, and subjected to rapid remediation—forming a virtuous cycle by comparison to the limited disclosure culture among smaller providers.

Weaknesses and Exposed Gaps​

• Azure’s Critical Vulnerability Rate: While Azure performs well on overall exposure, its slightly elevated critical vulnerability rate indicates possible gaps at the interface between legacy systems, rapid feature deployment, and the scale of integration with on-premises technologies like Active Directory. This observation is supported by multiple risk disclosures and a handful of recent cybersecurity incidents reported in mainstream tech media.
• Google Cloud’s High Exposure: Google Cloud’s leadership position in overall asset exposure and ease-of-exploitation categories suggests that users may be taking greater risks with default configurations, or that the platform’s security tools are less effective at preventing basic mistakes. Although Google’s cloud division is investing in security, these numbers indicate ongoing challenges.
• Long Tail Risk in the Hosting Ecosystem: Smaller clouds and major hosting providers show disproportionately high risk. For organizations seeking cost savings or niche hosting features, the tradeoff may be materially greater risk of unremediated vulnerabilities.

The Business and Operational Impact​

For businesses, these findings are more than academic. The massive scale of exposure means each percentage point of vulnerable assets translates directly to an increased probability of breach—potentially leading to regulatory action for noncompliance, financial loss, intellectual property theft, or reputational damage.

Case Examples: Real-World Repercussions​

• Although the report does not single out named breaches, recent industry news highlights how misconfigured or untracked cloud storage, forgotten public APIs, or exposed backend portals have led to incidents involving customer data leaks, ransomware, and compliance violations. The scale of modern multi-cloud environments only heightens the prospect of such events repeating, particularly where organizational visibility is lacking.

Regulatory Consequences​

• GDPR and CCPA: Unaddressed vulnerabilities in cloud assets containing personal data could result in severe penalties under data protection regulations, forcing organizations to prove they exercised “due diligence” in platform selection and ongoing oversight.
• PCI DSS, HIPAA, and more: Sectors with legacy regulatory environments face additional operational scrutiny, where deviations from secure cloud configuration best practices can jeopardize certification or lead to forced audits.

Mitigation: What Security Teams Must Do​

CyCognito’s report, in line with best practices published by organizations like NIST and the Cloud Security Alliance, offers several recommendations:

• Go Beyond Traditional Inventory Tools
  Static, documentation-based asset inventory is no longer enough. Organizations need “seedless” discovery capabilities—tools that scan outside the known perimeter, identifying assets based on external threat intelligence.
• Adopt Automated, Dynamic Testing
  Security testing must be continuous and dynamic, assessing not just code during development but also applications and environments after deployment. Vulnerabilities can emerge through drift, misconfigurations, or third-party software updates. Periodic, point-in-time scans are inadequate.
• Prioritize Exposure Management
  Resources should align with real-world exploitability, not just theoretical severity. Organizations should rank and remediate exposures based on how likely they are to be found and abused by attackers, bridging the gap between security teams and operational realities.
• Invest in Multi-Cloud Security Tools
  Avoid vendor lock-in for security controls, but ensure monitoring solutions can ingest, analyze, and correlate data from all cloud environments in use, including smaller providers and legacy hosting platforms.

Concrete Steps​

• Inventory all public-facing cloud assets through external scanning.
• Monitor for open ports, default credentials, and known vulnerable software components.
• Institute strict governance around cloud service usage, mandating registration and review.
• Deploy cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools that offer real-time visibility, alerting, and automated remediation—prioritizing those with proven efficacy across multiple platforms.

The Road Ahead: Evaluating the Findings​

Despite the improvement among major cloud providers in overall risk reduction, the CyCognito study highlights persistent structural weaknesses in the broader cloud landscape. Organizations cannot afford to assume their provider is “safe by default,” nor can security teams rely exclusively on internal inventories and static testing. The burden of securing assets still falls primarily on customers, who must contend with a rapidly evolving threat space, misconfigured environments, and imperfect tooling.

Industry Response and Future Directions​

• Cloud Provider Initiatives: Major platforms are gradually introducing more proactive security by default, but user configuration remains a leading source of breaches.
• Security Vendor Innovation: The rise of attack surface management and external attack surface monitoring reflects industry recognition of these challenges.
• Regulatory and Insurance Pressure: Both regulators and cyber-insurers are ratcheting up pressure on organizations to prove they have effective, externally validated cloud security programs in place.

Conclusion​

The CyCognito report, as summarized and contextualized above, provides crucial, data-backed insight for WindowsForum readers and IT professionals managing complex, distributed cloud environments. While AWS and Azure exhibit relatively strong security postures, Google Cloud’s high exposure rate and the alarming statistics from smaller providers and hosting companies should prompt urgent evaluation and action. The scale and ease with which vulnerabilities can be found and exploited in certain cloud environments make it imperative that organizations augment existing tools with dynamic, continuous, and externally focused security approaches. In a world where every exposed asset is a potential breach waiting to happen, maintaining visibility, vigilance, and robust response capabilities is no longer optional—it is essential for survival in the modern digital economy.