Cloud and Compliance

Most compliance pain isn’t caused by auditors.

It’s caused by teams trying to reconstruct reality six months later.

Cloud compliance gets easier when you accept one rule:

Audits are evidence problems.

Not policy problems.

Not tool problems.

Evidence problems.

What compliance actually requires

Whether it’s HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC 2… the themes repeat:

  • control access
  • protect data
  • log activity
  • manage change
  • prove you did the above

If you can’t prove it, it doesn’t count.

The shared responsibility trap

Every cloud provider will tell you:

  • they secure the underlying infrastructure
  • you secure your configs, identities, data, and apps

This is where teams get burned.

They assume:

  • “AWS is compliant, so we’re compliant.”

Nope.

Your account can be misconfigured in 12 different ways before lunch.

Rule: your provider gives you primitives. You still have to build the controls.

Evidence-first controls that actually help

1) Audit trails and logging

Logs aren’t just for forensics.

They’re how you answer:

  • who changed what
  • when
  • under what authorization

What to implement:

  • centralized cloud audit logs (e.g., CloudTrail)
  • access logs for critical data stores
  • retention policies aligned to requirements
  • alerting for high-risk actions

Rule: logging without retention is cosplay.

2) Access controls (the perennial failure)

Auditors don’t care that you “intend” least privilege.

They care that:

  • MFA is enforced
  • privileged access is reviewed
  • offboarding is real
  • service accounts are controlled

Evidence to keep ready:

  • access review results + sign-off
  • MFA enforcement policy
  • list of privileged roles and owners

Rule: least privilege isn’t a statement. It’s a recurring process.

3) Risk assessments (make them operational)

Risk assessments shouldn’t be a PDF that gets filed away.

Make them inputs to work:

  • top risks
  • mitigations
  • owners
  • dates

Evidence to keep:

  • risk register (even a lightweight one)
  • remediation tickets linked to findings

4) Data residency / sovereignty

If you have residency requirements:

  • choose regions intentionally
  • restrict data replication
  • document where “crown jewels” live

Evidence to keep:

  • region selection + policy
  • proof of storage locations

5) SLAs and vendor commitments

SLAs don’t make you compliant.

They help you define expectations.

But auditors will still ask what you did.

Evidence to keep:

  • vendor security docs
  • contracts / SLAs
  • your internal control mapping

A practical “audit readiness” checklist

If you want to remove the panic:

  • define your control owners (names, not teams)
  • automate evidence capture where possible
  • keep evidence export-first (so audits are push-button)
  • run quarterly access reviews
  • test restores (yes, restore… not just backup success)
  • keep a change log that matches reality (IaC helps)

The point

Cloud compliance isn’t “hard.”

It’s undisciplined.

Make compliance boring by making evidence repeatable.

Quotable rules

  • Audits are evidence problems.
  • If you can’t prove it quickly, it didn’t happen.
  • Your cloud provider isn’t your security team.
  • Compliance theater costs more than compliance.

FAQ

Q: What’s the fastest path to SOC 2 compliance for a cloud-native startup?

A: Start with a solid foundation: MFA everywhere, centralized logging with 1-year retention, access reviews every 90 days, and infrastructure as code for all changes. Use a compliance automation platform to map controls to evidence. Don’t try to be perfect: be consistent and documented. Auditors care more about repeatable processes than perfect security.

Q: How do I maintain compliance without slowing down engineering?

A: Automate evidence collection through your existing DevOps tooling. Use policy-as-code to enforce guardrails automatically. Schedule access reviews and risk assessments as recurring calendar events with assigned owners. When compliance is part of the daily workflow—not a quarterly scramble—it becomes sustainable.

Q: What’s the biggest compliance mistake cloud teams make?

A: Assuming their cloud provider’s compliance certifications cover their own responsibilities. AWS being SOC 2 compliant doesn’t make your AWS account compliant. The shared responsibility model means you must implement and document your own controls for identity management, data classification, encryption key handling, and access governance.