Expert: Cloud security fails due to leadership, not tech

Venkata Nedunoori, director of engineering at Dentsu, argues that cloud security incidents are routinely misdiagnosed as technical failures when the root causes lie in unclear ownership, slow decision-making, and operating models that can't keep pace with cloud speed, according to CIO.

He contends that when misconfigurations occur, "the technology behaved exactly as designed. Nothing malfunctioned. What failed was how decisions were made, how ownership was defined."

Cloud environments expose organizational weaknesses by removing the friction and delays that once compensated for ambiguous accountability. Nedunoori emphasizes that "modern cloud platforms operate at a pace that exposes weaknesses in governance models that once worked adequately."

He advocates shifting focus from adding controls to clarifying who owns risk, who has authority to act, and how decisions are made implicitly through defaults and permissions: "The most resilient organizations are not those with the most controls, but those with clear accountability, fast decision-making and leaders willing to revisit assumptions that no longer fit operational reality."