See every misconfiguration before attackers do.

Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report consistently identifies misconfiguration and misuse as the leading cause of cloud-related breaches, not novel zero-days or sophisticated attacker techniques. The following are the specific misconfiguration classes that Quantm's posture management tooling flags most frequently in Canadian SMB environments at initial assessment.

• Publicly accessible storage buckets: AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage buckets set to public read expose data to anyone with the URL, no credentials required. This configuration is often introduced by developers testing an application and never reverted. Canadian organizations have faced OPC investigations directly traceable to unintentionally public storage containing customer records, employee data, and financial documents.
• MFA disabled on admin and privileged accounts: Microsoft's own telemetry indicates that over 99% of account compromise attacks against Azure AD succeed against accounts without MFA. For M365 Global Administrator accounts specifically, which can disable security controls, read all mailboxes, and reset any password, the absence of MFA is effectively an open door. Yet in Quantm's onboarding assessments, a significant minority of SMB tenants have at least one admin account with MFA disabled or set to an easily bypassed legacy method.
• Over-permissioned service accounts and application identities: Service accounts in cloud environments accumulate permissions over time as developers add access for new integrations and rarely remove it. A service account used to read from a single S3 bucket often ends up with S3:* on all buckets within eighteen months. When attackers compromise application credentials, through code repositories, environment variables, or SSRF vulnerabilities, they inherit every permission that service account holds. Least-privilege enforcement for non-human identities is consistently the lowest-maturity control in SMB cloud environments.
• No logging or monitoring on cloud control plane: AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity Log, and GCP Audit Logs are the primary evidence sources for cloud incident investigation. In many SMB tenants, these logs are either not enabled, retained for only a few days, or not ingested into any SIEM or alerting system. An attacker who creates a new IAM user, elevates privileges, or disables security controls leaves trace evidence only in these logs. Without them, incident scope determination becomes impossible.
• Secrets stored in source code and environment variables: API keys, database connection strings, and cloud provider credentials committed to git repositories, including private repositories, are routinely discovered by automated scanners operated by both security researchers and threat actors. GitHub's secret scanning program detected over 12 million secrets in public repositories in 2023. Private repository access via a single compromised developer account exposes all credentials checked in across the organization's history.
• Unrestricted outbound network access: Cloud workloads with no egress filtering can freely communicate with command-and-control infrastructure, exfiltration endpoints, and credential-harvesting sites. Network security groups and VPC firewall rules default to permissive outbound configurations in most cloud providers. Without explicit egress controls, a compromised workload can exfiltrate terabytes of data with no network-layer signal.
• Stale external sharing in M365 and Google Workspace: SharePoint and OneDrive "share with anyone" links, Google Drive files shared externally without expiry, and Teams guest accounts from former contractors accumulate over time in every SMB tenant. These links represent uncontrolled access to business data that exists entirely outside your identity perimeter. A 2023 survey of Canadian M365 tenants conducted by a national managed security provider found that the average SMB had over 400 active "anyone with the link" sharing permissions on files containing sensitive data.

The split is well-documented in provider terms of service, but the majority of cloud breaches happen because SMBs don't realize which side of the line they're on.