Think your cloud is secure? Three common misconfigurations you’re probably overlooking

Cloud environments often appear secure on the surface, but the underlying architecture can hide overlooked risks. Three recurring missteps—often in routing and access control—continue to impact performance and security posture in hybrid environments.

1. Over-reliance on public internet routing

Organizations often assume that cloud traffic—once encrypted—is inherently safe to send across public internet routes. But this assumption ignores performance variability and the increased surface area for potential interception or service disruption.

Routing traffic over private backbones or through controlled, optimized paths can reduce exposure to these risks and improve application responsiveness—especially for latency-sensitive services like video conferencing or real-time collaboration.

2. Centralized traffic backhauling that adds latency

Routing all traffic through a single corporate data center was a common practice in pre-cloud architectures, but it’s poorly suited to today’s distributed environments. This model can cause significant delays, especially when users are far from the data center or trying to reach cloud services hosted elsewhere.

Allowing local breakout with appropriate security controls can improve performance and reduce strain on internal infrastructure.

3. Limited visibility into lateral traffic

Cloud environments that lack robust east-west traffic monitoring can leave organizations vulnerable to internal threats or post-breach lateral movement. Misconfigurations in firewall rules, identity roles, or routing logic often go undetected until an incident occurs.

Architectures that provide full traffic visibility and centralized policy enforcement are better equipped to catch these issues before they escalate.

Takeaway: Secure architecture needs to scale with complexity

As organizations grow more distributed, the network becomes a critical layer for both performance and security. Mesh-based SASE approaches, when implemented thoughtfully, offer a path to resolving some of the structural challenges introduced by cloud adoption—without the rigid limitations of legacy models.