A Comparative Evaluation of Cloud-Native Security Controls in AWS, Azure, and GCP

Abstract

Cloud-native architectures have revolutionized modern computing, but their fast deployment has demonstrated inconsistencies in security among the major providers of these applications, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. Although both platforms provide a set of controls designed specifically to allow regulating certain aspects, the presence of features like sandboxing, privileged access management (PAM), as well as workload isolation varies widely. The differences have implications for the security posture of organisations trying to use a multi-cloud approach. This article will seek to identify and contrast the natural shortcomings of native security tooling, evaluate the use of cloud marketplaces to address critical security gaps, and analyse the risks architecturally arising out of excessive use of third-party integrations. A cross-platform study of the existing controls offered by AWS, Azure, and GCP was performed through the review of technical documentation, CSPM capabilities, and scholarly/commercial research published in 2020-25. To conduct this comparative evaluation, a matrix was developed to compare native features with industry best practices in cloud security, along with the particulars of PAM, sandboxing, micro-segmentation, and threat detection. We found that the implementation of least privilege access is not consistent across platforms, with Azure providing more role-based access control (RBAC), and GCP having less developed controls on sandboxing compute workloads. Configurations CSPM products tend not to notice a drift in configuration in real time, and many of the most important controls need to be tooled. Also, extensions to marketplaces make it harder to comply and respond to incidents. Cloud providers have evolved to provide security primitives, but critical gaps remain in the interpretation of the principles of zero trust in its native form. These inadequacies have to be addressed by organisations in terms of layered defence plans, active modelling of threats and enforcement of tight integration checks. Cross-platform security alignment is a vital requirement for healthy multi-cloud resilience.