The attack surface you probably do not know about
If your business runs anything on AWS — a website, an app, a database, backups — you have a cloud attack surface. That surface is made up of every resource, permission, and configuration in your account. Most of them were set up quickly and never reviewed.
The most common misconfigurations are not exotic. They are things like S3 buckets with public access left on, security groups that allow traffic from anywhere, IAM users without MFA, and access keys that have not rotated in years. None of these require a sophisticated attacker to exploit.
The problem is not that engineers make these mistakes on purpose. It is that cloud environments change constantly and nobody has time to audit every change manually.
The numbers
According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2024 was $4.88 million. For small businesses, a single breach is often company-ending — not just financially, but reputationally. Cyber insurance premiums have risen 50% or more in the past three years, and insurers increasingly require documented security controls before they will issue a policy.
Why this lands on the IT manager
Most small businesses do not have a dedicated security team. Security is one item on a long list that the IT manager or a developer owns alongside everything else. That person rarely has formal security training and almost never has time for a manual audit.
At the same time, the pressure to show evidence of security controls is growing. Cyber insurance applications ask detailed questions about your security posture. Enterprise clients and partners increasingly require SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance before signing contracts. And regulators in healthcare and finance have specific requirements that are getting harder to ignore.
The result is that IT managers are expected to answer security questions they were never set up to answer.
The 10 checks that matter most
You do not need to audit everything. These ten checks cover the most common and most dangerous misconfigurations in AWS accounts. If you can get these right, you eliminate the majority of your realistic attack surface.
Public S3 buckets
Exposed data is publicly downloadable by anyone with the URL.
Open security groups
Allows inbound connections from any IP on sensitive ports like SSH and RDP.
Root account without MFA
Full account access with no second factor. The highest-risk finding in any AWS account.
IAM users without MFA
User credentials can be phished or leaked without a second factor stopping unauthorized access.
Overly permissive IAM policies
Users and roles with more access than they need create larger blast radius on compromise.
Unencrypted EBS volumes
Data at rest is readable if the underlying storage is ever accessed directly.
CloudTrail not enabled
No audit log of API activity means you cannot detect or investigate a breach.
AWS Config not enabled
No record of configuration changes means drift goes undetected.
Public RDS instances
Database is reachable from the internet rather than only from within your VPC.
Access keys older than 90 days
Long-lived credentials are more likely to be compromised through leaks or phishing.
What a real security review costs
A professional cloud security assessment from a consultancy runs between $15,000 and $50,000 depending on the size of your environment. That price includes scoping, testing, a report, and a debrief. Most small businesses cannot justify that spend annually.
Enterprise tools like Wiz, Orca, and Lacework solve this problem at scale but start at $50,000 per year or more. They are built for security teams with dedicated staff to act on findings.
The gap between "I cannot afford a consultant" and "I cannot afford enterprise software" is exactly where most small businesses sit. That is the gap Cysvera Cloud is built for.
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