Cyber Threat Intelligence in a Cloud-Centric World

Cyber threats move quickly, and cloud environments expand your attack surface. In a cloud-centric world, threat intelligence must combine external feeds with your own cloud telemetry to stay useful. Teams often receive data from many tools, but without a clear plan it becomes noise. A simple approach helps: define what to watch, how to normalize it, and who will use the results.

Key data sources include both outside signals and inside observations:

  • Cloud provider logs: AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity Logs, Google Cloud Audit Logs
  • Cloud-native security tools: CSPM, CWPP, CNAPP
  • Identity and access analytics: unusual login patterns, key creation, privilege changes
  • Network and application telemetry: VPC flow logs, DNS logs, API gateways
  • Threat feeds and vulnerability alerts: vendor advisories, open source feeds
  • Internal incident history: past breaches, near misses, lessons learned

Clouds also present challenges: enormous data volume, noisy signals, and silos across security, DevOps, and SRE teams. Misconfigurations and excessive permissions are common weak points. Attacker techniques in cloud differ from on-prem, such as API abuse, credential compromise, and rapid movement across services.

To make threat intelligence work in practice, align with a formal framework and a repeatable process:

  • Map cloud events to a framework like MITRE ATT&CK for cloud
  • Build an ingestion pipeline with normalization, enrichment, and scoring
  • Share insights with the right teams: SOC, DevSecOps, and incident response
  • Automate enrichment and response where possible, using SIEM or SOAR playbooks

Practical steps you can take today:

  • Start with a small, curated set of feeds plus your own telemetry
  • Normalize data to a common schema (for example, JSON with timestamps, sources, and indicators)
  • Tag and rate signals, linking IOCs to cloud events
  • Create rules that automatically enrich cloud signals with context (which service, region, user)
  • Integrate with your security platform and incident response playbooks
  • Review and update signals after incidents; test for false positives

Key Takeaways

  • Cloud threat intel requires combining external feeds with cloud telemetry.
  • Focus on data quality, normalization, and automation.
  • Align with MITRE ATT&CK for cloud and integrate with SOC/DevSecOps.