Terminology Index

Glossary

2953 terms

Cloud Audit Logging Coverage

Cloud audit logging coverage identifies which control-plane, data-plane, identity, network, key, database, cluster, workload, and security-service events are collected, excluded, delayed, or unavailable.

Cloud Batch Remediation Strategy

Cloud batch remediation strategy groups resource instances by shared root cause, owner, environment, dependency, risk, and fix mechanism while preserving resource-level evidence and exceptions.

Cloud Break-Glass Access

Cloud break-glass access is a protected, monitored, limited, tested, and revocable emergency administrative route independent enough to survive normal identity failure.

Cloud Chain of Custody

Cloud chain of custody records the identity, authority, time, method, source, transfer, access, copy, transformation, analysis, retention, and disposition of each cloud evidence item.

Cloud Compliance

Meeting regulatory, contractual, and framework requirements for systems and data hosted in the cloud, while accounting for the shared-responsibility model that splits obligations between the cloud provider and the customer.

Cloud Compliance Boundary

A cloud compliance boundary separates provider evidence, customer implementation, shared controls, workload scope, data, people, process, and applicable obligations.

Cloud Compliance Landscape

The overall set of regulations, standards, and certification schemes that apply to cloud-hosted systems, such as FedRAMP, ISO 27001/27017, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA, and how they interact under the shared-responsibility model.

Cloud Compliance Tools

Software that helps manage cloud compliance by mapping controls to frameworks, collecting evidence automatically, monitoring for drift, and producing audit-ready reports. They make multi-framework compliance feasible at cloud scale and speed.

Cloud Computing

The on-demand delivery of computing resources, servers, storage, databases, and software, over the internet from a provider, paid for as used rather than owned. It is the foundation that all cloud security concepts build upon.

Cloud computing lets organizations rent scalable infrastructure and services instead of buying and running their own, with the provider operating the underlying hardware and data centers. This shifts both capability and responsibility: it enables speed and scale but introduces shared responsibility, new attack surfaces like the management plane, and configuration as the dominant risk. Understanding the service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and deployment models is the starting point for securing anything in the cloud.

Introduced in: Cloud Security Foundations

Examples

Renting virtual servers on demand instead of buying physical hardware.
Using a managed cloud database rather than running your own.
Scaling capacity up during peak load and paying only for what is used.

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Cloud Configuration Drift

The gradual divergence of a cloud environment's actual settings from its intended secure baseline, as people make ad-hoc changes over time. Drift quietly reopens risks that were once closed, which is why it must be detected continuously.

Cloud Containment

The actions taken to stop an active cloud incident from spreading, using cloud-native controls, such as isolating a workload, revoking credentials and sessions, restricting a resource's network access, or quarantining an account.

Cloud Containment and Recovery

Cloud containment and recovery use service-specific identity, policy, resource, trigger, artifact, network, data, telemetry, validation, rollback, and business-restoration controls.

Cloud Control Plane Resilience

Cloud control plane resilience is the ability to retain or restore safe administration after identity compromise, tenant lockout, key loss, regional failure, destructive automation, billing suspension, or provider disruption.

Cloud Control-Plane Audit

Cloud control-plane audit records administrative API activity for identity, policy, resource, network, logging, and configuration changes with actor, target, request, outcome, and time.

Cloud Credential Abuse Hunting

Cloud credential abuse hunting searches for suspicious use of passwords, keys, certificates, tokens, roles, and workload identities rather than assuming a credential's mere existence is malicious.

Cloud Cross-Boundary Access Analysis

Cloud cross-boundary access analysis identifies effective public, anonymous, cross-account, cross-tenant, cross-project, organization-wide, partner, vendor, and time-limited access to cloud resources.

Cloud DLP

Cloud data loss prevention: tools and policies that detect and stop sensitive data, like personal, financial, or health information, from being exposed or leaving the cloud environment improperly, by inspecting data and enforcing handling rules.

Cloud Data Protection Evidence

Cloud data protection evidence links classification and residency requirements to observed stores, copies, flows, identities, keys, logs, retention, deletion, and restore results.

Cloud Data Protection Path

A cloud data protection path covers classification, access, encryption, keys, copies, exports, logs, backups, replication, retention, deletion, integrity, and recovery.

Cloud Data Security

Protecting data stored and processed in the cloud through classification, encryption, access control, and key management, so sensitive information stays confidential and intact regardless of which cloud service holds it.

Cloud Data-Plane Logging

Cloud data-plane logging observes operations on workload or data resources such as object access, queries, invocation, and secret retrieval under service-specific coverage.

Cloud Database Assessment

Evaluating the security of managed and self-hosted cloud databases, checking for public exposure, weak authentication, missing encryption, excessive privileges, and inadequate logging, since databases often hold an organization's most sensitive data.

Cloud Deployment Model

A cloud deployment model describes where and for whom cloud capabilities operate and the identity, network, data, contract, operations, and recovery dependencies involved.

Cloud Detection

Identifying malicious or anomalous activity in a cloud environment by analyzing control-plane logs, identity events, network flows, and managed threat-detection services. It focuses on the signals unique to cloud, especially identity and API abuse.

Cloud Detection Context

Cloud detection context combines API behavior with identity, session, source, device, resource, policy, data, deployment, network, expected change, and source health.

Cloud Detection Readiness

Cloud detection readiness connects high-value resources and credible threats to enabled telemetry, identity and resource context, detections, routing, owners, runbooks, testing, and investigation access.

Cloud Directories

Cloud-hosted identity directories, such as Microsoft Entra ID or other cloud directory services, that store user accounts, groups, and attributes and authenticate access to cloud and SaaS applications. They are the cloud equivalent of on-premises Active Directory.

Cloud Directory

A provider-hosted identity directory that stores and manages users, groups, applications, devices, roles, or related identity objects for cloud access and policy.

Cloud Effective Exposure Severity

Cloud effective exposure severity rates the complete path from source reachability and identity through permitted action to affected data, workload, control plane, blast radius, detection, and recovery.

Cloud Effective Permissions Analysis

Cloud effective permissions analysis determines what a subject can actually do after identity, resource, trust, group, hierarchy, boundary, condition, session, and explicit-deny policies are combined.

Cloud Evidence Preservation

Cloud evidence preservation retains relevant audit, configuration, versions, policies, identities, sessions, snapshots, artifacts, logs, and provider records with time, integrity, access, and limitations.

Cloud Exposure Path Analysis

Cloud exposure path analysis determines whether a source can reach a workload through DNS, edge services, public or private addresses, routing, firewalls, gateways, service policy, authentication, and listening services.