The process of identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks to cloud infrastructure, data, and operations. In cloud computing, this encompasses the shared responsibility model (what the provider secures vs. what you must secure), threat modeling, disaster recovery planning, and alignment with frameworks like the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Azure Security Benchmark, and NIST.
A fintech startup uses the AWS Well-Architected Framework review to assess risk across five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. They identify that a single-region deployment is a critical risk and implement multi-region failover to reduce their recovery time objective (RTO) from hours to minutes.
Risk management is not a single cloud service but a practice supported by assessment, security posture, governance, and resilience tools. AWS Well-Architected Tool helps review architectural risks, Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps identify and remediate security and compliance risks, Google Cloud Architecture Framework provides best-practice guidance for reducing operational and security risk, and OCI Cloud Guard helps detect and respond to risky configurations and activities.