Zero Trust in the Cloud: Does It Actually Work?

Every vendor pitch deck has "Zero Trust" somewhere on slide three. It's right between "AI-powered" and "cloud-native." But here's the thing—when you're running workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP, does zero trust actually work inside the cloud? Or is it just another buzzword marketing phrase that sounds great in a boardroom but falls apart when you try to implement it?

Most zero-trust conversations focus on user access to cloud applications, including ZTNA, SASE, and SSE. That's important, and we've covered it extensively. However, there's a gap: what about zero-trust security inside your cloud environments? The workloads, services, machine identities, and east-west traffic? That's what we're tackling here.

What Cloud Zero Trust Is Supposed to Mean

The core idea is simple: never trust, always verify. However, in cloud environments, this takes on a different form than traditional zero-trust security for user access.

Cloud identity is the new perimeter. We're not just talking about your employees—we're talking about service accounts, IAM roles, machine identities, and workload-to-workload authentication. In AWS alone, you're dealing with 15,000+ IAM actions. Azure has nearly 19,000. Each cloud does identity differently, and that complexity creates risk.

Least privilege for workloads. Every service, every container, and every function should have exactly the permissions it needs—nothing more. But cloud defaults are often permissive, and developers grant broad access to "just make it work." Those overprivileged roles become attack paths.

Microsegmentation in cloud networks. Instead of creating environments that allow open communication between workloads, services and endpoints, of flat networks where any workload can talk to any other, you carve things up. Security groups, network policies, service mesh controls, and even third-party tools.

Continuous validation of posture. You don't just check your cloud configuration once. You continuously monitor for drift, misconfigurations, and risky changes. The minute something shifts—an S3 bucket goes public, an IAM role gets escalated privileges—you know about it.

This is where the NIST Zero Trust framework's five pillars—identity, devices, networks, applications, and data—map directly to cloud-native controls. The question is: can you actually implement it?

Where Zero Trust Falls Apart in the Cloud

Here's where the vendor slides stop, and reality begins.

Multicloud identity chaos. AWS has IAM. Azure has Entra ID. GCP has Cloud IAM. Each cloud handles service accounts, roles, and permissions differently. Building a consistent least-privilege model across all three is akin to speaking three languages simultaneously while juggling.

Most organizations end up with a patchwork—tight controls in AWS, loose controls in Azure, and "we'll get to GCP later." That's not zero trust. That's partial trust with extra steps.

Cloud IAM is too complex to get right manually. The sheer volume of permissions, combined with the speed of cloud deployments, means manual IAM reviews can't keep up. Teams grant broad access to unblock developers, with the intention of tightening it later. Later never comes.

East-west traffic is a blind spot. Traditional security focuses on north-south (in and out of your network). But in cloud environments, the real risk is workload-to-workload communication. If an attacker gains access to one service, can they move laterally to your databases? Your secrets managers? Your admin APIs?

Configuration drift breaks everything. You locked down your environment last month. Someone pushed a change last week. Now you have an overly permissive security group, a public endpoint that shouldn't be public, and an IAM role that can assume admin privileges. Without continuous monitoring, you're flying blind.

Partner Solutions That Address Cloud Zero Trust

This is where cloud-native security platforms come in. Here's how key partners position their solutions for cloud zero trust:

Lifecycle Cloud Security Management: These platforms address cloud zero trust across the entire lifecycle. Their capabilities tackle the cloud IAM problem by identifying overprivileged identities, mapping effective permissions, and recommending least-privilege policies. They continuously monitor for misconfigurations and drift while protecting workloads at runtime. The recent evolution integrates these capabilities with SOC workflows for faster detection and response.

Comprehensive Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): For organizations with significant cloud footprints or those seeking multicloud coverage from a single pane of glass, these solutions offer CSPM across multiple clouds. They map to compliance frameworks, identify attack paths, and integrate with broader security ecosystems. The strength here lies in native integration and the ability to extend coverage to other clouds without requiring the deployment of additional agents.

Workload Communication Security: These solutions extend beyond user access to workload-to-workload communications. For organizations seeking to apply zero-trust principles to how cloud services communicate—eliminating implicit trust between workloads and enforcing identity-based access—these solutions offer cloud-native segmentation without the complexity of traditional network controls.

Cloud Workload Protection: Extending endpoint protection expertise to cloud workloads, these solutions provide runtime threat detection and response for containers, VMs, and serverless functions. They integrate with cloud-native telemetry to detect lateral movement, suspicious behavior, and indicators of compromise in real-time.

Cloud Service Visibility and Data Protection: These solutions provide visibility into both sanctioned and shadow IT cloud services. For zero-trust security in the cloud, they offer context-aware data protection across SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS environments, helping organizations understand what data resides where and who's accessing it.

What Actually Works

Okay, enough about tools. Here's what actually moves the needle when implementing cloud zero trust.

Start with cloud identity—but scope it to workloads. Before you buy anything, understand your cloud IAM posture. Who (and what) has access to what? What permissions are actually being used vs. granted? This isn't about your employee identities—that's a different talk track. This is about service accounts, IAM roles, and machine identities. There are tools that can automate this discovery and recommend right-sizing. Without this visibility, everything else is built on sand.

Implement continuous posture monitoring. CSPM isn't just for compliance checkboxes. Use it to detect drift, identify attack paths, and prioritize remediation based on actual risk. When a misconfiguration creates an exploitable path to your crown jewels, you need to know immediately—not during the next quarterly audit.

Enforce segmentation at the workload level. Cloud-native network controls (security groups, network policies, service mesh) can enforce microsegmentation, but they require intentional design. Default configurations are too permissive. Map your workload communication patterns, then implement policies that allow only what's necessary.

Integrate with your SOC. Cloud security can't be a silo. The telemetry from your CNAPP, CSPM, and CWPP tools must be integrated into your security operations. Attack paths identified in the cloud should correlate with endpoint and network detections. This is where Palo Alto's Cortex integration story and Microsoft's Defender ecosystem become compelling.

Measure it or it doesn't exist. What percentage of your IAM roles adhere to the principle of least privilege? How many attack paths exist to your critical assets? What's your mean time to remediate cloud misconfigurations? If you can't answer these questions, your cloud zero trust initiative is a PowerPoint, not a reality.

Move Security to the Front

Whether you choose to use cloud-native controls, third-party tools, or a combination, how you implement these controls is critical to reducing deployment delays, enhancing risk posture, and ensuring attestation throughout the process.

WWT has developed a Security to the Front operating model that ensures these sero-trust controls are inherited downstream, resulting in continuously compliant workload environments that ensure zero trust principles are adhered to.

Bottom Line

Applying zero-trust principles in the cloud is real. It works. But it's not just about user access—we've covered that; that is only part of the equation. It's also about applying zero-trust principles to your cloud infrastructure, including identities, workloads, data, and east-west traffic, and being able to attest that these principles are implemented throughout the environment and that controls are in place to detect when these principles are violated.

The partner ecosystem has matured. Solutions from Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, Zscaler, CrowdStrike and Netskope. There are many cloud native and third-party tools that can address different aspects of cloud zero trust in cloud environments, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. For some enterprises, a platform approach may be best; for others, a cloud-native approach with bespoke third-party tools that they integrate with each other more effectively than they did two years ago.is the best path.

But tools alone won't get you there. WWT can work with you to assess your current maturity level and determine the next steps to help you achieve your desired outcome on your ZT journey. The key is to measure progress. And when a vendor tells you they'll "make you zero trust" by deploying their platform, ask them specifically how they address cloud IAM, workload protection, and east-west traffic. If they pivot back to ZTNA and user access, they're not answering the question.

Cloud zero trust is the gap. Let's close it.

Next up: Your CSPM Tool Can Do More Than Yell About Compliance