In the race between cloud attackers and defenders, time is the critical factor — and time increasingly favors the attackers.
Security teams take approximately 145 hours to resolve a single alert — far too late to prevent a breach. Meanwhile, attackers are now exfiltrating data nearly twice as fast as they did just 12 months ago.
The widening gap between attack speed and response time exposes a fundamental truth: traditional peace-time cloud security approaches are no longer sufficient in today's threat landscape.
The Peace-Time Security Paradigm
For years, organizations have approached cloud security through what could be called a peace-time mindset, focusing primarily on configuration management, compliance and vulnerability scanning. This approach assumes security teams have the luxury of time to identify, prioritize and remediate issues before attackers can exploit them.
The foundation of peace-time security has been cloud security posture management (CSPM), which helps organizations identify misconfigurations and maintain compliance. CSPM represented a significant step forward when cloud environments were relatively static and changes occurred at a manageable pace.
But 45% of cloud risks now change monthly due to the ephemeral nature of modern cloud infrastructure. The changing nature of cloud environments creates an evolving attack surface that peace-time security tools struggle to protect.
Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short
Traditional, posture-focused security approaches prove increasingly inadequate for several reasons, including:
1. The Disconnect Between Configuration and Runtime
Cloud security posture management tools excel at identifying static risks — misconfigurations, excessive permissions, compliance violations — but they come up short with limited visibility into actual runtime behavior. The limitation creates a dangerous blind spot, considering that a perfectly configured environment can still be compromised.
Misconfigurations remain a significant concern, but attackers are increasingly targeting vulnerabilities at the application code layer. Consider the CapitalOne breach, where bad actors used a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability to trick a web application into accessing private AWS metadata credentials, ultimately exfiltrating data from over 100 million customers. Or the SolarWinds supply chain attack, where malicious code was inserted into a legitimate software update process, creating backdoors in thousands of organizations' cloud environments. The Log4Shell vulnerability demonstrated how a single flaw in a widely-used logging library could allow remote code execution across countless cloud workloads.
Devastating cloud breaches often involve a combination of weaknesses — from insecure code in cloud-native applications to credential theft and exploitation of trusted access paths. Organizations that focus on configuration management without formidable runtime protection leave themselves open.
2. An Unmanageable Volume of Alerts
The volume of security findings awaiting remediation for most organizations has reached crisis proportions, numbering in the millions for some organizations. It’s become mathematically impossible for security teams to address all issues in a timely manner, which forces them to make difficult prioritization decisions without full context.
When security teams are overwhelmed by alerts, critical warnings get lost in the noise. In fact, 90% of organizations report wanting better risk prioritization. The struggle to identify which alerts deserve immediate attention is ubiquitous.
3. The Fragmented Security Landscape
Organizations now use an average of 16 different cloud security tools — a 60% increase from the previous year, which indicates a corresponding increase in silos of visibility and response.
The same survey revealed that 91% of respondents believe the number of point tools they use creates blind spots affecting their ability to prioritize risk and prevent threats. Despite this, 88% of organizations struggle to identify what security tools they actually need.
4. The Speed Gap
As we’ve already shown, the growing gap between the speed of attacks and the speed of response is at crisis point. In other words, by the time a traditional security approach identifies, prioritizes and remediates a vulnerability, attackers have likely already exploited it. Still, however, 71% of organizations admit that rushed deployments have introduced security vulnerabilities.
The Real-Time Imperative
The limitations of cloud security approaches point to a clear imperative: organizations need to move beyond peace-time security to adopt real-time cloud protection capable of preventing threats as they occur.
Real-time cloud security represents a fundamental shift, one that combines proactive risk reduction with active threat prevention and rapid response capabilities. The real-time approach acknowledges that while we should strive to eliminate vulnerabilities before deployment, some risks will inevitably reach production environments. And when they do, we need security that can detect and prevent exploitation before data is compromised.
The Four Pillars of Real-Time Cloud Security
A comprehensive real-time cloud security approach must address four key pillars:
1. Unified Visibility Across the Full Cloud-Native Stack
Real-time protection requires complete visibility across all layers of the application stack — from code to cloud infrastructure to runtime behavior. Traditional approaches that focus on a single layer (like cloud configuration scanning) miss the complex interrelationships between different components.
By unifying visibility across code, supply chain, configurations, identity, cloud logs, network traffic, endpoints and vulnerabilities, organizations can identify complex attack patterns that would be invisible when viewing any single layer in isolation.
2. Context-Aware Detection
Context-aware detection moves beyond looking at isolated findings to understanding the relationships between different security signals. For example, a single misconfiguration might not be critical on its own but when combined with a vulnerable application and excessive permissions, it becomes a dangerous attack path. For this reason, 93% of organizations want a security solution that identifies interconnected vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Real-time detection must incorporate:
- Runtime behavior monitoring to identify suspicious activity
- Anomaly detection powered by AI to spot unusual patterns
- Correlation of security signals across different layers and data sources
- Intelligence about actual attack techniques and behaviors
3. Automated Prevention and Response
When attacks move at machine speed, defense must operate at machine speed as well. Real-time cloud security requires automated prevention and response capabilities that can:
- Block malicious activities in real-time — before damage occurs.
- Automatically isolate compromised resources.
- Implement temporary compensating controls when vulnerabilities can't be immediately patched.
- Trigger automated remediation workflows for known issues.
4. Cross-Team Collaboration
Perhaps most importantly, real-time cloud security requires breaking down the traditional silos between security, development and operations teams. Conflict between DevOps and SecOps has long been a source of stress for practitioners. Additionally, according to The Cloud-Native Security Report 2024, 92% of organizations say that conflicting priorities between teams hinder efficient development and deployment.
In a real-time security model:
- Cloud security teams gain visibility into runtime threats to better prioritize configuration issues.
- SOC analysts receive cloud context to accelerate investigation and response.
- Developers get actionable security feedback from both posture assessment and runtime observation.
From Reactive to Proactive
Implementing real-time cloud security doesn't mean abandoning posture management and shift-left practices. It means complementing these approaches with real-time detection and prevention capabilities that protect organizations when posture-based measures aren't enough.
The path forward requires:
- Breaking down data silos: Bringing together security data from across the enterprise into a unified data platform that enables correlation and context
- Leveraging AI and automation: Using advanced analytics to detect complex attack patterns and automate response actions at machine speed
- Integrating security across the lifecycle: Connecting security from code to cloud to SOC to provide complete protection
- Enabling cross-team collaboration: Creating shared visibility and workflows that bridge the gaps between development, operations and security
Time Favors the Prepared
The cloud has delivered on its promises of agility, innovation and scale. But it’s also created an environment where attackers can move faster and more stealthily than ever.
In the new reality, organizations can’t rely solely on peace-time security approaches. They need comprehensive, real-time protection that can stop attacks in progress, correlate threats across the entire application stack and enable rapid, automated response.
As the State of Cloud-Native Security Report aptly notes, "Time favors the prepared." In today's threat landscape, preparation means moving beyond static posture management to embrace real-time cloud security — combining proactive risk reduction with active threat prevention to protect your most critical cloud assets.
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