Accidentally Managing AWS? The Security and Cost Risks You May Be Overlooking
You didn’t mean to be running AWS. Most people don’t. It just sort of… happens. Someone leaves and you’re the most technical in the room. The original setup was “temporary” and then it wasn’t.
And now AWS sits with you. Not officially, there’s no grand job title attached to it, but when something slows down, or a bill spikes, or a security notification lands, it’s your problem.
You probably know the environment reasonably well. You’ve built bits of it and you’ve fixed things under pressure. You’ve Googled your way through more than you’d ever admit publicly. And to be fair, it works. That’s the tricky part.
It Grew Organically
Infrastructure rarely gets designed in one clean pass. It grows.
- You needed something quickly, so you set it up and carried on.
- Someone was blocked, so you widened permissions rather than stall a release.
- Performance dipped, so you increased the database size because that felt safer than trimming elsewhere.
- There’s probably a test environment still running. You assume it’s fine. You haven’t looked at it in a while.
None of this is reckless. It’s practical decision-making. It’s what happens in real businesses. But over time, those practical decisions stack up. And one day you realise you’re not completely sure how tidy, or how secure, the whole thing is anymore.
The Cost Question Lurks in the Background
Most of the people we speak to have had that moment with an AWS invoice.
Not a catastrophic number. Just higher than expected.
You dig in. It’s not obvious. A few instances are bigger than they probably need to be. A reporting process is hitting production. Something’s scaling more aggressively than you realised.
It’s rarely dramatic overspend. It’s quiet inefficiency.
We’ve worked with software businesses where simply restructuring a database and resizing correctly made a noticeable dent in their monthly costs. Nothing magical. Just proper architecture.
When cloud isn’t your core discipline, optimisation falls down the priority list. Product always wins.
That’s understandable. But it does add up.
The Security Side Is Less Forgiving
Cost creep is irritating. Security gaps are different.
We’ve reviewed environments where:
- A server was publicly exposed without anyone realising.
- Developers were sharing credentials because it was quicker.
- Database and compute were sitting on the same instance.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM) had grown… messy.
Again, not because anyone was careless, but because everyone was busy.
Cloud security works on a shared responsibility model. AWS secures the underlying platform. You secure how it’s configured.
If something is misconfigured, that doesn’t fall back on Amazon. It falls on you.
And if there’s a breach, it isn’t just technical clean-up. It’s regulatory exposure. It’s client trust. It’s awkward conversations with insurers. It’s disruption while you try to stabilise things.
That’s a heavy thing to carry when infrastructure isn’t your main job.
The Bit That Usually Gets Admitted Quietly
At some point in these conversations, someone says, “I think it’s fine, but I’d sleep better if someone double-checked it.”
That sentence comes up a lot. Not panic, just unease.
Because deep down, you know the environment evolved. It wasn’t designed with long-term governance in mind.
Documentation might be thin. Disaster recovery exists, theoretically. Backups run. Well, you believe they run.
One of the businesses we worked with relied heavily on a single technical architect. Processes weren’t fully documented. Knowledge transfer hadn’t really happened.
If that one person had stepped away, rebuilding confidence in the environment would have been painful.
That’s not unusual. It’s common.
This Isn’t About Competence
You can be excellent at building software and still not be a cloud governance specialist. Those are different skill sets.
Cloud architecture, cost control, identity structure, encryption policies, recovery planning, they require focus. Ongoing focus.
When AWS sits with someone who’s also responsible for roadmap, features, clients and people, it becomes reactive.
No one intends it to be fragile. It just drifts.
What Changes When You Hand It Over
When we step into environments like this, it’s rarely about tearing everything down. It’s about steadying it.
- We document properly.
- We review IAM and permissions with fresh eyes.
- We remove unnecessary exposure.
- We separate workloads where they shouldn’t be sharing space.
- We right-size resources.
- We formalise backup and recovery processes.
Across our client success stories, the common themes are stronger security, better governance, cost reduction and removal of single-person risk.
But the biggest shift isn’t technical. It’s that the internal lead stops carrying the accountability alone.
You Don’t Have to Keep Owning This by Default
nTrust has been supporting UK businesses since 2002, and many of our long-term relationships started exactly like this, with someone who’d quietly inherited more risk than they were comfortable with.
We’re not there to take over your product decisions. We’re not there to criticise what’s been built. We’re there to de-risk it and make sure your AWS environment is secure, cost-effective, documented and defensible.
So that if there’s ever a question from a client, an auditor, or a regulator, you can answer it calmly. And so that if something does go wrong, you’re not facing it alone.
If you’ve found yourself running AWS because no one else was going to, that’s understandable. But that doesn’t mean you should keep carrying the risk indefinitely.
A proper review doesn’t have to be dramatic. It just needs to be honest. And sometimes, that’s a relief in itself.
If this reflects your IT infrastructure and resenates with you, get in touch now for a non-judgemental conversation.
