Common pitfalls

With the scale, speed, and flexibility of the cloud comes complexity. This complexity leads to inherent pitfalls. We will review two broad areas that are common pitfalls for organizations that the IT auditor should be aware of. The first area involves administrative pitfalls that include not managing resource usage, an inability to control shadow IT, and a lack of automation. The second area concerns technical pitfalls that include misconfiguration, providing overly permissive access to users, and the inadvertent exposure of data, such as credentials.

Let’s look at the most common pitfalls IT auditors should focus on during an audit, and recommendations they may consider providing to a cloud customer.

Inability to forecast resource usage and costs

Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and GCP have hundreds of services to choose from. Many cloud customers usually choose services not suited to their business needs due to poor...