Why Bringing in an External Eye on Your Cloud Setup Might Save Your Bacon

When you step into a new role, take on a project, or inherit a cloud setup from someone else, there's always that moment of pause—what exactly have I just walked into? 

As someone who works with many startups and small tech businesses, I’ve seen how easy it is to neglect cloud security when speed is the priority.

Let’s be honest—Dev teams are under massive pressure to deliver.

“Fail fast” is the motto, especially when you’re a startup trying to launch a product or an SME building something new.

The tech stack often grows rapidly with young developers, outsourced agencies, or contractors focused on quick delivery. And while that approach might get you to market quicker, it rarely leaves time for robust cloud security practices to be baked in properly.

The problem?

You’ll either invest in security early or retrofit it later—and the second option usually has a much bigger price tag.

A little while back, I was part of a third-party cloud security assessment for a business with exactly this challenge. They’d built a pretty solid product, but their AWS setup was a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster—stitched together quickly, spread across different regions, with a mix of best guesses and default settings.

On the surface, it was functioning well enough, but the deeper we looked, the more worrying things we uncovered.

Here’s a flavour of what an audit found:

• Data being transferred over HTTP instead of HTTPS

• Long-lived refresh tokens without proper rotation or revocation

• No business continuity or disaster recovery plan—no snapshots, no backups, nothing

• Critical services missing basic things like encryption, versioning, or logging

• IAM permissions wide open, allowing privilege escalation

• SQL injection vulnerabilities and insecure APIs

• Web Application Firewalls? Nowhere to be found

None of these issues were malicious. They were just the result of a fast-moving team doing what they could with the time and knowledge they had. And that’s entirely understandable.

But here’s the thing: If no one takes a proper look from a security-first perspective, you’re flying blind.

And the stakes are higher than just bad press or fines—it’s your customers’ trust, your ability to recover from an outage, and in some cases, your entire business model.

Having an external pair of eyes—whether it’s a one-off review or a regular audit—can make a world of difference. You benefit from someone who isn’t caught up in your delivery timelines or day-to-day firefighting. Someone who can spot the gaps and help you fix them before they become front-page news.

For startups and SMEs, this doesn’t have to mean hiring a CISO or building a security team from scratch. Sometimes, just a few days of expert review can give you a clear action plan and peace of mind.

And just for the record, this isn't me. However, I'm happy to introduce people to organisations that can help on either side of the pond - I'm about Information Security and the governance, policies, procedures and controls around data - which focuses far more on the human side of things.

So if you’ve just stepped into a new tech role, inherited a cloud environment, or you’re not quite sure how secure your setup is… pause. Take a breath. And consider getting someone in to check the foundations.

Because when it comes to cloud security, what you don’t know really can hurt you.

Alan.