Complying with the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Cloud Advisory: How Tenable Can Help

The Monetary Authority of Singapore’s cloud advisory, part of its 2021 Technology Risk Management Guidelines, advises financial institutions to move beyond siloed monitoring to adopt a continuous, enterprise-wide approach. These firms must undergo annual audits. Here’s how Tenable can help.

Complying with government cybersecurity regulations can lull organizations into a false sense of security and lead to an over-reliance on point-in-time assessments conducted at irregular intervals. While such compliance efforts are essential to pass audits, they may do very little to actually reduce an organization’s risk. On the other hand, government efforts like the robust framework provided by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore’s central bank and integrated financial regulator, offer valuable guidance for organizations worldwide to consider as they look to reduce cyber risk. 

The MAS framework is designed to safeguard the integrity of the country's financial systems. The framework is anchored by the MAS Technology Risk Management (TRM) Guidelines, published in January 2021, which covers a wide spectrum of risk management concerns, including IT governance, cyber resilience, incident response, and third-party risk. The TRM guidelines were supplemented by the June 2021 Advisory On Addressing The Technology And Cyber Security Risks Associated With Public Cloud Adoption.

The cloud advisory highlights key risks and control measures that Singapore’s financial institutions should consider before adopting public cloud services, including:

• Developing a public cloud risk management strategy that takes into consideration the unique characteristics of public cloud services
• Implementing strong controls in areas such as identity and access management (IAM), cybersecurity, data protection, and cryptographic key management
• Expanding cybersecurity operations to include the security of public cloud workloads
• Managing cloud resilience, outsourcing, vendor lock-in, and concentration risks
• Ensuring the financial institution’s staff have the adequate skillsets to manage public cloud workloads and their risks.

The advisory recommends avoiding a siloed approach when performing security monitoring of on-premises apps or infrastructure and public cloud workloads. Instead, it advises financial institutions to “feed cyber-related information on public cloud workloads into their respective enterprise-wide IT security monitoring services to facilitate continuous monitoring and analysis of cyber events.” 

Who must comply with MAS TRM and the cloud advisory?

While the MAS TRM guidelines and cloud advisory do not specifically state penalties for compliance failures, they are legally binding. They apply to all financial institutions operating under the authority’s regulation in Singapore, including banks, insurers, fintech firms, payment service providers, and venture capital managers. A financial institution in Singapore that leverages the services of a firm based outside the country must ensure that its service providers also meet the TRM requirements. MAS also factors adherence to the framework into its overall risk assessment of an organization; failure to comply can damage an organization's standing and reputation.

In short, the scope of accountability to the MAS TRM guidelines and cloud advisory is broad.

Complying with the MAS cloud advisory: How Tenable can help

We evaluated how the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform with Tenable Cloud Security can assist organizations in achieving and maintaining compliance with the MAS cloud advisory. Read on to understand two of the cloud advisory’s key focus areas and how to address them effectively with Tenable One — preventing dangerous attack path vectors from compromising sensitive cloud assets.

1. Identity and access management: Enforcing least privilege access

The MAS cloud advisory calls for financial institutions to “enforce the principle of least privilege stringently” when granting access to assets in the public cloud. It further advises firms to consider adopting zero trust principles in the architecture design of applications, where “access to public cloud services and resources is evaluated and granted on a per-request and need-to basis.”

At Tenable, we believe applying least privilege in Identity Access Management (IAM) is the cornerstone for effective cloud security. In the cloud, excessive permissions on accounts that can access sensitive data are a direct route to a breach.

How Tenable can help: CIEM and sensitive data protection

The Tenable Cloud Security domain within Tenable One offers integrated cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) that enforces strict least privilege across human and machine identities in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Kubernetes environments.

• Eliminate lateral movement: CIEM analyzes policies to identify privilege escalation risks and lateral movement paths, effectively closing dangerous attack vectors.
• Data-driven prioritization: Tenable provides automated data classification and correlates sensitive data exposure with overly permissive identities. This ensures remediation focuses on the exposures that threaten your most critical regulated data.
• Mandatory controls: The platform automatically monitors for privileged users who lack multi-factor authentication (MFA) and checks for regular access key rotation.

Here’s a detailed look at how Tenable can help with three of the cloud advisory’s IAM provisions:

Source: Tenable, December 2025

2. Securing applications in the public cloud: Minimizing risk exposure

For financial institutions using microservices and containers, the MAS cloud advisory advises that, to reduce the attack surface, each container includes only the core software components needed by the application. The cloud advisory also notes that security tools made for traditional on-premises IT infrastructure (e.g. vulnerability scanners) may not run effectively on containers, and advises financial institutions to adopt container-specific security solutions for preventing, detecting, and responding to container-specific threats. For firms using IaC to provision or manage public cloud workloads, it further calls for implementing controls to minimize the risk of misconfigurations.

At Tenable, we believe this explicit mandate for specialized cloud and container security solutions underscores the need for continuous, accurate risk assessment. Tenable Cloud Security is purpose-built to meet these requirements with full Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) capabilities across your cloud footprint. This ability to see and protect every cloud asset — from code to container — is crucial for enabling contextual prioritization of risk. We also believe that relying solely on static vulnerability scoring systems, like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is insufficient because it fails to reflect real-world exploitability. To ensure financial institutions focus remediation efforts where they matter most, Tenable Exposure Management, including Tenable Cloud Security, incorporates the Tenable Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) — dynamic, predictive risk scoring that allows teams to address the most immediate and exploitable threats first.

How Tenable can help: Container security and cloud-to-code traceability

Tenable unifies cloud workload protection (CWP) with cloud security posture management (CSPM) to provide continuous, contextual risk assessment.

• Workload and container security: Tenable provides solutions tailored to your security domain:
  • For the cloud security professional: Tenable offers robust, agentless cloud workload protection capabilities that continuously scan for, detect and visualize critical risks such as vulnerabilities, sensitive data exposure, malware and misconfigurations across virtual machines, containers and serverless environments.
  • For the vulnerability management owner: Tenable offers a streamlined solution with unified visibility for hybrid environments, providing the core capabilities to extend vulnerability management best practices to cloud workloads: Tenable Cloud Vulnerability Management, ensures agentless multi-cloud coverage, scanning containers in registries (shift-left) and runtime to prevent the deployment of vulnerable images and detect drift in production.
• Cloud-to-code traceability: This unique feature links runtime findings (e.g., an exposed workload) directly back to its IaC source code, allowing for rapid remediation and automated pull requests, minimizing misconfiguration risk as mandated by MAS.

Here’s a detailed look at how Tenable can help with two of the cloud advisory’s provisions related to securing applications in the public cloud:

Source: Tenable, December 2025

Gaining the upper hand on MAS compliance through a unified ecosystem view

Tenable One is the market-leading exposure management platform, normalizing, contextualizing, and correlating security signals from all domains, including cloud — across vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identities spanning your hybrid estate. Exposure management enables cross-functional alignment between SecOps, DevOps, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) teams with a shared, unified view of risk.

Tenable Cloud Security, part of the Tenable One Exposure Management platform, supports continuous adherence to the MAS cloud advisory and enables risk-based decision-making by eliminating the toxic combinations that attackers exploit. The platform unifies security insight, transforming the effort to achieve compliance from a necessary burden into a strategic advantage.

Learn more

• View the on-demand webinar:  Mastering your Cloud Security — Navigating Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Cloud Advisory Guidelines
• Read the cloud security use case: Cloud misconfiguration identification and remediation
• Watch the video: Enforce least privilege across cloud identities