Recently, there has been a flurry of announcements claiming to have what we call Runtime Insights, the ability to prioritize vulnerabilities. Here are two examples:
- Datadog Press Release: Datadog Expands Application Security Capabilities To Automatically Uncover Vulnerabilities In Production Code
- Lacework Blog: Finally, a reason for your developers to want an agent
I can confirm that this approach works, and it works very well. It substantially decreases the number of vulnerabilities that a team has to manage, sometimes by a factor of 100 or more!
How do I know it? Because Sysdig invented this approach.
We identified this unmet need after talking with many companies who were trying to implement shift left strategies but struggling to make it work in practice. We heard the overwhelming frustration of chasing endless software vulnerabilities, and we realized that we could use Runtime Insights (aka what’s in use in a production environment) to revolutionize the lives of security and developer teams. We delivered this capability over a year ago and have since worked with forward-looking partners like Snyk to integrate it into their solutions.
Our confidence in the effectiveness of this approach comes from observing its impact across our diverse user base, which includes many large-scale global production environments. The results have been remarkably consistent.
When a leader comes up with a technology that pushes the envelope, it’s only natural for followers to adapt and emulate it. We welcome this, as it ultimately serves as a net positive for users in the long run.
However, Sysdig hasn’t rested on its laurels. In addition to refining our implementation multiple times, we have moved forward and expanded the application of Runtime Insights to several other critical areas, like Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) security. For example, with Sysdig, you can easily restrict your users’ privileges to precisely what they need to perform their jobs effectively. (By the way, by monitoring and modeling actual cloud access patterns, we found that 90% of granted permissions are not in use). Additionally, you can reduce the surface area of your IaC definitions according to the behavior of your applications at runtime. And we are not done, as there are multiple innovations that we plan to unveil in this space.
Our unwavering commitment to you is that we will continue to be the ones who advance the state of the art in cloud security. From shift left to shield right, you can’t secure the cloud without deep Runtime Insights. Sysdig is and will continue to be unmatched at that.