Cutting Through Cloud Jargon: Who Owns Access Security, Anyway?

Why Clarity, Not Complexity, Keeps the Cloud Secure

In the great cloudy soup of shared responsibilities, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and vendor-neutral TLAs (three-letter acronyms), it’s easy to forget that one of the biggest threats to cloud security might not be the attacker, but the ambiguity between IT customers and the people they pay to keep the lights on.

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
- George Orwell.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), cloud-native vendors, and infrastructure partners, where “you own it” and “we secure it” are phrases with just enough wiggle room to drive a truck full of liability through. If you’re protecting a small to mid-sized enterprise (SME), you’ve likely been on at least one call where everyone agreed they were not responsible for a recent misconfiguration. That’s not just frustrating, it’s potentially dangerous.

The Cloud Isn’t the Problem. The Misunderstanding About Access Security Is

Cloud technology itself isn’t inherently insecure. AWS, Microsoft, Google; they’ve all got formidable security baked into their platforms. But using the cloud securely? That’s a whole different kettle of containers.

Cloud environments operate on a shared responsibility model. You’ve heard this before. But while the big players publish glossy diagrams explaining who’s responsible for what, MSPs and clients rarely sit down to interpret them in the same way. One party assumes the MSP is handling access security reviews. The MSP assumes the client knows IAM like the back of their hand. Neither actually confirms it.

Suddenly, no one’s offboarding and deprovisioning users, legacy credentials are floating about like piratical ghost ships, and there are a dozen service accounts with standing admin rights that no one remembers approving.

In access security, ambiguity becomes vulnerability.

Jargon: The Fog Machine of Accountability

The language we use in cloud security can act like a force field around responsibility. Ask an MSP what “identity governance” includes in their offer, and you’ll likely get a fluent recital of acronyms: IAM, ILM, SAML and SCIM, CIEM, SSO, MFA. All valid, but meaningless if the client’s IT manager just wants to know: Are you watching who has access to what, and fixing it when it goes wrong?

This is especially acute in SMEs, where internal teams may not have a full-time security lead. IT teams are stretched, multitasking, and frankly, trusting MSPs to tell them if something is a risk. But instead, they get dashboards, not diagnoses. What they really need is a human conversation, free from techno-mysticism, with a straight answer about roles, tools, and gaps.

Responsibility Theatre: Where Everyone Acts Secure

The result is something I like to call “responsibility theatre.” It looks like this:

• The MSP has policies, but they aren’t monitoring access drift in real time.
• The client assumes audits are automated, but no one’s reviewed entitlements since the last compliance panic.
• Security alerts are routed to inboxes, but no one owns triage.
• Everyone has MFA, but only on login, not on privilege escalation.

It feels like security. But it’s just performance. And the audience? Usually, an attacker waiting for the curtain to fall.

The Path to Clarity: Kill the Jargon, Write the Map

The only way out is through. Through the buzzwords, the vagueness, and the assumption that “everyone knows what that means.” Here’s how to start fixing it.

Create a Responsibility Matrix
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This doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple RACI table (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) is often enough. Sit down with your MSP or cloud partner and list out:

Provisioning new users

Revoking access

Privilege escalation approvals

Audit trail reviews

Secrets management

CI/CD pipeline permissions

Incident response ownership

Ask who does what. Don’t accept vague answers. Nail down the who, how often, and the access security tool used.

Write in Plain English

‍Avoid letting vendors define things for you. Write your own definitions of roles and tasks using business language. Not “CIEM enforcement on all IDP-linked roles,” but: “Someone checks that only the right people can access cloud resources, and that this is reviewed monthly.”‍

Automate and Annotate
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Where possible, leverage tools like Trustle to automate access reviews, revoke unused privileges, and document everything. It’s not enough to say, “We use JIT,” you need to know how, where, and with what fallback when it fails.

Clarity doesn’t mean doing everything manually. It means making sure the automation is accountable, with logs, owners, and escalation paths that real humans understand.

‍Review Access Like You Review Finances

We budget. We forecast. We audit spend. Why don’t we do the same for access? At least quarterly, if not weekly, sit down and ask:

Who still has access they don’t need?

Who owns access reviews for each system?

Are there any privileges older than their job descriptions?

What risks would a regulator, or a ransomware gang, see in this picture?

The answers are often uncomfortable. That’s how you know you’re getting somewhere.

No One Gets to Opt Out of Security

MSPs are essential. So are internal teams. But neither can opt out of being clear about who’s in charge of what. You wouldn’t sign a lease where it’s unclear whether you or the landlord is responsible for the boiler. Why do we do that with the cloud?

Ambiguity is the enemy of accountability. And in the cloud, accountability is everything.

So, the next time someone says, “Don’t worry, that’s covered,” ask them to show you how, by whom, and what happens if it fails.

Because when it comes to cloud access security, trust should never be assumed; it should be architected.

Let’s stop just performing security and start communicating it instead.

If you’re looking for your own access security solution, one that allows onboarding in minutes and offboarding automatically, cutting excessive permissions in a fast, simple, and auditable way, and takes as little as 30 minutes to set up, please drop us a line for a no-obligation chat.

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