Cloud Penetration Testing
Expert-led testing of your AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud environments the way a real attacker approaches them: through an over-permissioned IAM role, a public storage bucket, an exposed management API, or a leaked access key in a code repository. We measure how far an intruder moves across your cloud tenant, what data sits inside the blast radius, and which controls actually stop them. Delivered by a North Carolina cybersecurity firm that has protected regulated businesses since 2002.
What Is Cloud Penetration Testing?
Cloud penetration testing is an authorized, simulated cyberattack against your cloud environment: the AWS accounts, Azure subscriptions, and Google Cloud projects that now hold your identities, data, and applications. Security professionals attempt to exploit misconfigured identity and access management, over-broad permissions, exposed storage, weak network controls, and vulnerable workloads, then escalate privilege and move between accounts exactly as a real attacker does. The result is documented proof of how far an intruder gets once they have a foothold in your cloud, how quickly they reach sensitive data, and which of your existing controls actually slowed them down. Unlike a traditional network test, a cloud test works within the shared responsibility model: the provider secures the infrastructure, and everything you configure on top of it is yours to defend, which is precisely where nearly every cloud breach originates.
Key Takeaways
- Cloud penetration testing targets the layer you are responsible for under the shared responsibility model: identity, permissions, storage, network configuration, and workloads. The provider secures the data center; you secure everything you build on it.
- Most cloud breaches are not exotic exploits. They are misconfigured IAM roles, public storage buckets, exposed access keys, and over-privileged service accounts, and a real test finds the ones a scanner never chains together.
- Petronella Technology Group has delivered offensive security testing since 2002, holds a BBB A+ rating since 2003, and is a CyberAB Registered Provider Organization (RPO #1449) with CMMC Registered Practitioners on staff.
- Our methodology follows NIST SP 800-115, the Penetration Testing Execution Standard, and MITRE ATT&CK for Cloud, and satisfies cloud testing expectations under PCI DSS, CMMC, NIST 800-171, HIPAA, and SOC 2.
- Founder Craig Petronella is an MIT-certified cybersecurity professional, NC Licensed Digital Forensics Examiner (License #604180-DFE), and cybersecurity expert witness who investigates real intrusions, so our testing mirrors how cloud breaches actually unfold.
Why Your Cloud Needs a Real Test
Moving to the cloud does not move your security problem to the provider. It relocates it to a control plane most teams configure faster than they can secure, and the mistakes are silent until someone finds them.
Almost every organization we test has adopted the cloud the way everyone does: quickly, in pieces, and under pressure to ship. A developer spins up a storage bucket for a one-time export and forgets to lock it down. An automation script is handed an identity role with far more permission than it needs because narrowing it down took time nobody had. An access key is committed to a repository during a late-night fix and never rotated. Each decision is reasonable in isolation. Together they form the exact attack surface that cloud intruders monetize, and none of them announce themselves.
The uncomfortable truth is that the cloud attacker rarely needs a vulnerability in the traditional sense. They need a permission you did not intend to grant. A leaked key with the ability to list roles, a role that can be assumed by too many principals, a function that reads secrets it should never touch: these are the paths that turn a single foothold into control of an entire tenant. Cloud penetration testing runs that path with your permission and hands you the map before someone else draws it. It answers the question your architecture diagram cannot: if one credential leaks tomorrow, what can it actually reach?
The findings are frequently uncomfortable and almost always cheap to fix. An over-privileged role is a policy edit once someone knows it exists. A public bucket is a single setting. The reason these conditions persist is not negligence; it is that nobody has ever looked at the environment from the attacker's seat. Cloud posture scanners flag individual misconfigurations, but they do not chain them into the multi-step path that reaches your crown-jewel data, and they cannot tell you which findings actually matter versus which are noise. That judgment is what a real test provides.
Petronella Technology Group brings an investigator's perspective to this work. Because our founder handles digital forensics and expert-witness cases involving real intrusions, we have watched the aftermath of these exact configurations more than once, and we test the paths attackers actually take rather than the ones that produce an impressive slide. Pair a test with our managed cybersecurity services and the findings get remediated, monitored, and retested rather than filed away.
What We Attack in Your Cloud
Once we have a foothold, everything your configuration exposes is in scope. Identity comes first, because in the cloud identity is the perimeter.
Identity, Access, and Privilege
- IAM analysis: over-permissioned roles, wildcard policies, and users who can escalate their own privileges through policy attachment or role assumption
- Privilege escalation paths unique to each provider: pass-role abuse in AWS, managed identity and role assignment abuse in Azure, service account impersonation in Google Cloud
- Leaked and exposed credentials: access keys in code, secrets in environment variables, tokens in metadata services, and keys that were never rotated
- Cross-account and cross-tenant movement: trust relationships and federation that let a foothold in one account reach resources in another
- Hybrid identity paths: on-premise Active Directory compromise that extends into Entra ID and connected cloud tenants, and the reverse
Data, Workloads, and Network
- Storage exposure: public or misconfigured object storage holding patient records, contract documents, controlled unclassified information, or backups
- Container and Kubernetes attacks: exposed dashboards, over-privileged pods, container breakout, and registry access that yields production credentials
- Serverless and function abuse: functions with excessive permissions, injectable event sources, and secrets reachable from the execution environment
- Network and exposure review: over-open security groups, management ports facing the internet, and workloads reachable that were meant to be private
- Logging and detection validation: which of our actions your cloud-native monitoring and SOC actually noticed, and how long that took
Where a specific provider is the primary concern, we offer a dedicated Azure penetration test that examines Entra ID, managed identities, and subscription-level controls in depth. Where internally hosted or hybrid applications are involved, we recommend pairing this engagement with a web application penetration test.
Find Out What One Leaked Key Can Reach
We will scope a cloud penetration test against your real AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environment and show you the path from one exposed credential to your most sensitive data. Call 919-348-4912 or request a quote.
Testing Across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
The attacker's goals are the same on every platform, but the techniques are provider-specific. We test each cloud on its own terms.
Amazon Web Services
We assess IAM policy sprawl, pass-role and privilege-escalation paths, exposed S3 storage, over-broad security groups, instance metadata exposure, Lambda permission abuse, and cross-account trust relationships, mapped against AWS-specific attacker techniques.
Microsoft Azure
We examine Entra ID configuration, managed identity and role assignment abuse, subscription and management group permissions, storage account exposure, key vault access, and hybrid paths that connect on-premise Active Directory to your Azure tenant.
Google Cloud Platform
We test service account impersonation, IAM binding misconfiguration, project and organization-level permissions, Cloud Storage exposure, and the token-based paths that let a single service account reach resources far beyond its intended scope.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid
Most organizations run more than one cloud alongside on-premise systems. We test the seams between them: federation, shared identity, and the trust relationships that let a foothold in one environment become access to another.
Cloud vs. Traditional Network Penetration Testing
The two tests overlap but answer different questions, and the cloud version demands provider-specific skill that a traditional network test does not.
Cloud Penetration Testing
- Focus: identity, permissions, storage, and the control plane of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, within the shared responsibility model
- Question answered: if one credential or role leaks, how far across the tenant does an attacker reach, and what data is exposed?
- Typical findings: over-privileged IAM, public storage, leaked keys, privilege-escalation paths, weak logging, cross-account movement
- Best for: any organization running production workloads or storing regulated data in the cloud
Traditional Network Penetration Testing
- Focus: on-premise networks, Active Directory, servers, and the perimeter between the internet and your internal systems
- Question answered: can an attacker get in, and once inside, how quickly do they reach domain administrator and your data?
- Typical findings: flat networks, weak Active Directory, credential harvesting, lateral movement, exposed services
- Best for: organizations with substantial on-premise infrastructure, which most still have
The honest answer to "which one do we need?" is usually both, because almost no organization is purely cloud or purely on-premise. If your data and applications have largely moved to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, a cloud test is where the real risk now lives. If you still run significant on-premise systems, combine it with an internal penetration test and an external penetration test so one program covers the full picture.
Many clients combine these scopes into a single network penetration testing engagement so that one report covers the full path from the open internet, through the cloud control plane, to the data an attacker is actually after. We will help you decide during scoping rather than selling you the larger engagement by default.
Which Attacker Do You Want Us to Be?
A cloud test is defined by where it starts. We choose the starting position with you during scoping, because different assumptions produce genuinely different answers.
Leaked Credential
We begin with a single low-privilege access key or user account, exactly as an attacker would after finding one in a code repository, a log file, or a public paste. This is the most requested scope because it models the most common real cloud intrusion and produces the most actionable findings.
Compromised Workload
We start from a foothold on a running instance, container, or function, as though an application vulnerability gave an attacker code execution. This tests what the workload's own identity and the surrounding environment allow an intruder to reach.
Malicious Insider
We operate as a developer or administrator who already holds legitimate cloud access and decides to abuse it. This scope answers what a departing engineer or a compromised administrator account could quietly take or destroy.
Unauthenticated External
We start from the public internet with no access at all and test what your cloud exposes to anyone: public storage, exposed management interfaces, forgotten endpoints, and services reachable that were meant to be private.
Configuration Review
A read-only, credentialed assessment of your identity, storage, network, and logging configuration across the tenant. Ideal when you want the widest possible coverage of misconfiguration without active exploitation.
Purple Team Mode
We run the engagement alongside your defenders, announcing each technique so your team can confirm whether their cloud logging and detection caught it. Less about finding holes and more about tuning detection, and highly effective for teams with an established SOC.
Our Cloud Pen Test Process
A structured, standards-aligned engagement built on NIST SP 800-115, the Penetration Testing Execution Standard, and MITRE ATT&CK for Cloud, with written rules of engagement agreed before any testing begins.
Scoping and Rules of Engagement
We agree in writing on the starting position, the accounts, subscriptions, and projects in scope, the testing window, escalation contacts, and the resources we will not touch. Provider notification requirements are handled where they apply, and production-critical systems are identified up front and treated by agreement rather than by discovery.
Reconnaissance and Enumeration
We establish the agreed foothold, then map the cloud landscape: identities and roles, permission boundaries, storage, network configuration, running workloads, and the trust relationships that connect accounts and tenants. In the cloud this enumeration phase is where most of the real attack surface is discovered.
Privilege Escalation and Credential Access
We pursue the first meaningful escalation and then better ones, using pass-role abuse, role assumption, service account impersonation, metadata and secret extraction, and misconfigured policy chains. Every technique used is logged with a timestamp so your team can correlate it against their own cloud telemetry afterward.
Lateral Movement and Objective Pursuit
With elevated access we move toward agreed objectives: tenant-wide administrative control, a specific data store, the backup infrastructure, or a segmented account. Destructive actions are excluded, exfiltration is simulated rather than performed, and anything with operational risk is coordinated with your team first.
Reporting and Executive Debrief
You receive a report written for two audiences: an executive summary that explains business risk in plain language, and a technical section with reproduction steps, evidence, timestamps, and specific remediation guidance mapped to each provider. We walk your team through it on a live debrief so questions get answered while the findings are fresh.
Remediation Support and Retesting
After you fix the confirmed findings, we retest them to verify the fixes hold and issue an attestation letter suitable for auditors, insurers, and enterprise customers. A finding is only closed once we have proven the fix works in practice.
What You Receive After the Test
Documented Attack Path
A step-by-step narrative from the starting foothold to each objective reached, with the technique, the timestamp, and the evidence at every hop, so leadership understands the actual consequence rather than a severity label.
Identity and Permission Findings
A map of the over-privileged roles, escalation paths, and trust relationships we exploited, with the specific policy changes that close each one, because in the cloud identity is where most risk concentrates.
Ranked Findings With Evidence
Each finding carries a business-risk rating, technical detail, captured evidence, and clear reproduction steps so your team can confirm and fix it without guesswork or vendor back-and-forth.
Sensitive Data Exposure Report
A record of the regulated or confidential material we were able to reach, including public or misconfigured storage holding health records, contract files, or controlled unclassified information, mapped to the access level required to get there.
Detection Gap Analysis
A timeline of our activity matched against what your cloud logging and monitoring recorded, showing which techniques were caught, which were logged but unalerted, and which passed unnoticed entirely.
Retest and Attestation Letter
Validation that your fixes hold, documented in a letter you can hand to auditors, cyber insurers, prime contractors, and enterprise procurement teams.
Cloud Pen Test vs. the Alternatives
Cloud assurance is sold in several forms, and they are not interchangeable. Here is what each one actually delivers.
| Capability | Cloud Pen Test | Cloud Posture Scanner | Provider Security Center |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chains misconfigurations into a real attack path | Yes, core of the engagement | No, findings are per-resource | No, per-resource recommendations |
| Proves privilege escalation actually works | Yes, by executing it safely | Flags risk, does not prove it | No |
| Tests cross-account and hybrid movement | Yes, by attempting it | Rarely | No, single-tenant view |
| Validates cloud detection and response | Yes, with a technique timeline | No | Partially, native alerts only |
| Prioritizes what actually matters | Yes, by proven impact | No, alert volume overwhelms | By generic severity only |
| Independence for auditors and insurers | Yes, third-party attestation | Partially, tooling evidence only | No, first-party tooling |
None of this makes scanning worthless. Continuous cloud posture scanning is the right tool for catching a newly introduced misconfiguration between engagements, and we build it into our vulnerability assessment programs for that reason. If you are weighing testing against scanning directly, our guide to vulnerability scanning versus penetration testing walks through where each one earns its cost.
Price the Consequence, Not Just the Risk
A scoping call takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing. We will tell you honestly whether a cloud test, a network test, or an application test gives you the most value right now.
Cloud Testing for Compliance Requirements
Cloud environments fall squarely within most of the frameworks our clients operate under, and the evidence an assessor wants is specific.
PCI DSS requires penetration testing at least annually and after any significant change, and cardholder data hosted in the cloud is fully in scope. If your payment environment runs on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, testing must cover the cloud configuration and the segmentation that isolates the cardholder data environment from the rest of your tenant. Our reports are structured to map findings directly to the relevant requirements. See our PCI DSS compliance services for the broader program.
CMMC and NIST 800-171 expect defense contractors to control the flow of controlled unclassified information wherever it lives, including cloud environments, and to enforce least privilege and separation of duties. A cloud penetration test is direct evidence that those controls function together rather than existing only as policy statements, and it is particularly useful for proving that a cloud-hosted CUI enclave is genuinely bounded. As a CyberAB Registered Provider Organization (RPO #1449) with CMMC Registered Practitioners on staff, our team scopes testing to align with your System Security Plan. Explore our CMMC compliance services, or start with our CMMC compliance guide.
HIPAA requires covered entities and business associates to conduct an accurate and thorough risk analysis covering the risks to electronic protected health information, wherever that data is stored, and cloud storage of ePHI is common. Cloud testing answers the risk-analysis question directly: it demonstrates whether an ordinary credential can reach patient records it has no business reading. Craig Petronella is the author of How HIPAA Can Crush Your Medical Practice, and that framing informs how we document findings for healthcare clients pursuing HIPAA compliance.
SOC 2 and cyber insurance both look for evidence of independent testing, and insurers have grown specific about cloud controls after paying out on cloud-driven breaches. Carriers now ask whether administrative access is separated, whether keys are rotated, and whether storage is locked down. A cloud penetration test answers all three with evidence rather than assertion. Our SOC 2 compliance team can align the testing cadence to your audit period.
Why Businesses Trust Our Testing
- Attacker experience, not just tools. Our founder is an NC Licensed Digital Forensics Examiner and cybersecurity expert witness who investigates real intrusions, so we test the escalation routes attackers actually take through a cloud tenant.
- Manual validation of every finding. Automated tooling gives us coverage, but the exploitation, chaining, and judgment come from experienced testers who confirm each finding by hand before it reaches your report.
- Provider-specific depth. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each fail in their own way. We test each platform on its own terms rather than running a generic checklist that misses what is unique to yours.
- Compliance fluency. As a CyberAB Registered Provider Organization (RPO #1449), we know how PCI DSS, CMMC, HIPAA, and SOC 2 expect cloud testing to be scoped, executed, and documented.
- We can fix what we find. Many testing firms hand over a report and leave. Our managed security and compliance teams can implement the remediation, which means findings close instead of aging.
- Proven longevity. Founded in April 2002 and BBB A+ rated since 2003, we have defended North Carolina and national clients through more than two decades of evolving threats.
"Craig and his team treat your business like it's their own. That level of care and dedication is rare, and it's why we keep coming back."
Milo Rivera, TrustIndex verified review
We are rated 4.7 across 92 verified TrustIndex reviews and 5.0 across 15 Google reviews. You can read them on our reviews page. For a deeper look at how intrusions unfold once an attacker has a foothold, Craig Petronella's book How Hackers Can Crush Your Business covers the same ground our testers walk, and is listed with his other titles on our books page.
Related Security Services
Industries We Test For
Since 2002 we have tested cloud environments for organizations whose exposure carries regulatory as well as financial consequence.
Defense Contractors
Suppliers handling controlled unclassified information in cloud enclaves who need to prove that the enclave is genuinely bounded and that least privilege is enforced rather than merely documented.
Healthcare Practices
Medical, dental, and behavioral health organizations storing electronic protected health information in the cloud, where an over-broad credential can read far more than it should.
Technology and SaaS
Product companies whose entire business runs in the cloud and whose enterprise customers require independent cloud testing evidence before signing.
Financial Services
Advisors, lenders, and accounting firms operating under GLBA and FTC Safeguards expectations, where cloud-hosted client data and separation of duties carry direct regulatory weight.
Law Firms
Practices holding privileged client material in cloud document stores, where a single compromised account can expose matters across every client the firm serves.
Manufacturing and Logistics
Operations connecting cloud platforms to on-premise plant systems and vendor integrations, where the seams between environments are rarely as tight as anyone assumes.
Cloud Penetration Testing Questions
What is cloud penetration testing?
How is cloud penetration testing different from a traditional network penetration test?
Do I need permission from my cloud provider to run a penetration test?
Which cloud platforms do you test?
Will a cloud penetration test disrupt our production environment?
How long does a cloud penetration test take?
How much does cloud penetration testing cost?
What compliance frameworks require cloud penetration testing?
Last Updated: July 30, 2026
Petronella Technology Group, Inc. · 5540 Centerview Dr., Suite 200, Raleigh, NC 27606 · 919-348-4912 · Serving Raleigh, the Triangle, and clients nationwide