I've been lurking here for a while, reading up on cloud security tools as we were going through an RFP process. We finally got approval for Tenable Cloud Security (formerly Tenable.cs) and I just finished our first full, organization-wide scan. I have to say, I'm... stunned. And not in a good way. The title says it all.
We've been operating under the assumption that our cloud environments (mostly AWS, some Azure) were in decent shape. Our cloud team is competent, we use some native tools, and we passed a third-party audit last year. Running Tenable felt like turning on the lights in a room you thought was clean, only to see dust and cobwebs everywhere. The sheer volume of findings is overwhelming.
Here's a breakdown of what we found, which might be useful for others who are evaluating or just starting out:
* **Critical & High Severity Misconfigurations:** We had over 120 critical/high findings. The most common types were S3 buckets with world-read permissions (some even had world-write), security groups left wide open to the internet (0.0.0.0/0 on SSH, RDP), and IAM roles with overly permissive policies attached. These weren't in obscure development accounts; some were in production-facing workloads.
* **Drift from Compliance Standards:** We mapped the scan against CIS benchmarks and a couple of industry-specific frameworks. Our compliance score is sitting at a dismal 42%. The biggest gaps were in logging and monitoring (CloudTrail not enabled in all regions, trails not encrypted, S3 log bucket not properly locked down).
* **The "Shadow IT" Problem:** The resource inventory feature alone was worth the price for us. It found accounts and resources we didn't have centralized visibility into—several old AWS accounts from acquired companies that were still running (and billing us for) unused instances.
I'm now tasked with leading the remediation project, and frankly, I'm hesitant about the scale of it. The tool is great at telling you *what's* wrong, but the path to fixing hundreds of resources across multiple accounts seems daunting. I'd love to hear from anyone further along in this journey:
* How did you prioritize remediation? Did you focus on criticals first, or by resource type, or by business unit?
* Did you run into significant pushback from development teams when you started locking things down? How did you handle the communication?
* We're still in the evaluation period for the full TCO. Beyond the license, what operational costs should I anticipate? Is the remediation workflow efficient enough, or will this require multiple dedicated FTEs?
I guess my main takeaway so far is that if you haven't run a dedicated cloud security posture tool, you should assume you have problems, even if you think you're secure. The gap between perception and reality is... humbling.