From fragmented to fortified: Securing multicloud with Zero Trust and containerized workspaces

The cloud has become the foundation of modern infrastructure, but in the rush to scale and innovate, security has often suffered. In today’s world, where most organizations operate across multiple cloud providers, the complexity of securing identities, workloads, and data has never been more challenging.

According to Microsoft’s 2024 Digital Defense Report, more than 51% of cloud workload identities are inactive, and 1.5 million credentials are still available in public repositories. These blind spots create unnecessary risks and leave organizations vulnerable to breaches, misconfigurations, and compliance failures.

If these numbers are still around your head and are starting to worry you, it’s time to rethink your strategies, strengthen governance, embrace AI-powered visibility, and enforce Zero Trust principles across every layer of your environment.

The hidden risk of inactive and overprivileged identities

One of the most concerning trends is the high number of unused or overprivileged identities across cloud services. Inactive accounts (especially those with admin rights) are often ignored during routine audits but serve as open doors for attackers.

These inactive accounts can be accessed through phishing, lateral movement, or token reuse. Attackers are increasingly attempting to increase access using ignored service accounts and outdated roles.

The best solution? Simpler: Organizations must adopt a strict identity hygiene practice. This includes regular reviews of cloud identities and roles, removing unused permissions, deleting inactive accounts, and implementing just-in-time access and least privilege as defaults.

Secrets stretch out: Exposed credentials in code

Another critical vulnerability exists inside development environments. Nearly 1 in 5 code repositories had exposed secrets, like API keys, database credentials, or access tokens.

In a multicloud setup, these secrets can give attackers cross-cloud access, bypassing perimeter defenses and accelerating compromise.

How can your company mitigate this risk?

• Implement secrets management policies in CI/CD pipelines.
• Use tools that automatically identify and block credentials from being pushed into code.
• Rotate credentials frequently and use environment-based secret vaults (e.g., AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault).

Using AI to monitor and defend multicloud environments

Traditional security procedures simply can’t keep up with the volume, speed, and sophistication of today’s threats. However, AI is proving to be a powerful ally in detecting and responding to cyber risks across multiple platforms, allowing the shift from reactive defense to proactive protection.

Using AI models, your company can analyze millions of security signals daily, detecting anomalies across identity, network, and application levels. Also, you may prioritize warnings based on real-world attacker behaviors and respond autonomously to established attack patterns.

In multicloud environments, where each provider has different security protocols, AI can consolidate telemetry across clouds to offer a single view for security teams, identify misconfigurations and shadow IT activities, and correlate identity usage across AWS, Azure, GCP, and more.

📌Read more: Is the Cloud Ready for Your AI and Production Workloads?

Zero Trust: The only viable framework for multicloud security

The traditional security model (based on defined perimeters and implicit trust) is no longer valid. In a multicloud world where users, devices, and workloads move freely, Zero Trust architecture is essential.

As we have seen in the past blogs, the key principle of Zero Trust is “never trust, always verify”. Every request must be authenticated and authorized, limiting privileged access and assuming attackers are already inside.

For multicloud environments, Zero Trust helps to:

• Standardize access policies across platforms.
• Reduce risk from lateral movement between cloud accounts.
• Enhance visibility and control for hybrid infrastructure.

📌Read more: What is Zero Trust? A modern guide to redefining enterprise security

Kasm: Securing the endpoint edge of your multicloud strategy

As organizations embrace remote work, DevOps pipelines, and BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policies, the endpoint has become a critical battlefield.

This is where Kasm comes in. A platform designed specifically to protect, isolate, and simplify access to web-based and containerized environments.

How Kasm improves your multicloud presence:

• Each session runs in a disposable container, reducing risk from persistent threats or configuration drift.
• Kasm is Zero Trust ready, with access control, MFA, and user session restrictions.
• Remote isolation allows users to access resources through a browser, protecting essential data from local devices, making it perfect for BYOD and third-party contractors.
• Kasm is multicloud compliant, allowing for smooth deployment across AWS, Azure, GCP, or on-premises, supporting hybrid security solutions.

By including Kasm in the stack, organizations can protect even the edge of their multicloud systems, ensuring consistent policy enforcement and reducing attack surfaces.

From reactive to resilient

Multicloud offers agility and innovation. However, without the right controls, it also brings fragmentation, blind spots, and risk.

A strong multicloud security posture requires ongoing identity and credential audits, AI-powered insights that unify and prioritize threats across providers, a Zero Trust mindset applied from code to cloud to endpoint, and automatic detection of secrets in code and development pipelines.

The landscape will only become more complex. But with the right architecture, intelligent automation, and strategic tools, businesses can move from reactive protection to resilient cybersecurity.

Ready to modernize your multicloud security using isolated workspaces?

At InterSources, we help businesses reimagine their security strategies for the AI and multicloud era. From Zero Trust implementation to Kasm workspace deployment, our experts are ready to guide your transformation.

📲 Let’s start the conversation.