Cloud security roles share a common purpose: to protect the data, workloads, and infrastructure that organizations run on public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. As computing has shifted from on-premises data centers to these providers, responsibility for security has become shared between provider and customer, and these roles manage the customer's side of that bargain. They apply established security principles to environments defined largely by software, identity, and configuration rather than physical hardware.
What these roles share#
- A shared responsibility model that fixes which duties belong to the provider and which to the organization.
- Environments defined and changed through code, so controls are written, versioned, and automated rather than wired by hand.
- A reliance on identity, configuration, and logging as the primary levers of security.
- Frequent collaboration across engineering, operations, and governance, with boundaries that vary from one organization to another.
Roles#
- Cloud Security Engineer: builds and operates the controls that keep cloud environments secure, working directly with identity, networking, encryption, and automation.
- Cloud Security Analyst: monitors, investigates, and reports on cloud posture, turning native telemetry into prioritized risk findings.
- Cloud Security Architect: designs the secure patterns and guardrails that shape how an organization adopts cloud services across many teams.
- Cloud Compliance Specialist: maps regulatory and contractual requirements onto cloud controls and demonstrates that standards such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are met.
A closely related role, the DevSecOps Engineer, works at the meeting point of development, operations, and security, embedding automated checks and guardrails into the pipelines that deliver cloud applications. It is documented under application security roles, but it collaborates with every role above.