Modern enterprise environments come in a variety of flavors across public and private cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Attackers are keen to find any weaknesses in this distributed and complex attack plane. Immature cloud offerings or traditional security tools such as EDR only protect part of the stack, leaving numerous gaps for attackers to lurk in. To mitigate these shortcomings, modern cloud detection and response (CDR) was designed to deliver complete, real-time protection across both hybrid and cloud-native environments.
Whether workloads live in AWS, Azure, GCP, on-premises datacenters, or Kubernetes clusters, the demand is the same. Security teams need solutions that deliver true multi-cloud independence, and best-in-class visibility, context, and control everywhere they operate.
Here’s what to look for as you dive into a cloud detection and response purchase decision.
Problem: Fragmented runtime visibility
Many security tools only monitor before deployment — missing what happens when apps are actually live. This is like doing a preflight inspection and then skipping inflight diagnostics and updates from air traffic control. Cloud workloads, especially containers and Kubernetes, are dynamic. Containers are uniquely short-lived, creating potentially huge visibility gaps. In fact, 60% of containers only live for one minute. So once the container no longer exists, that context, if not captured, is gone. This means teams may entirely miss critical context that can make the difference between an incident and a breach.
Solution: Purpose-built visibility
Choose a CDR solution that provides runtime visibility in real time across containers, Kubernetes, and cloud services. Sysdig taps directly into live system calls and cloud events, giving security teams continuous coverage across hybrid and multicloud environments, even for the most complex and ephemeral workloads.
Problem: Teams are overloaded with low-context alerts
Security teams are facing an onslaught of alerts that often lack any real insights, let alone correlation, forcing them to manually stitch together disparate events to determine if threats are legitimate or anomalous noise. This would be no different than firefighters fielding thousands of calls that just say something is wrong. Where is the fire? How big is it? Is it even a real fire? Without the needed context (who, what, where, and how), cloud threat triaging too often becomes cumbersome and error-prone across siloed individual responders. Chasing false alarms, missing real emergencies, and burning out from the onslaught of noise can make cloud security exhausting.
Solution: Automated correlation and cloud context
Look for a CDR platform that automatically correlates events into incidents or threats. Sysdig intelligently correlates and elevates threats based on time horizon, behaviors, impacted resources, and other related signals. Sysdig’s runtime analysis is enriched with relevant cloud misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and identity data to accelerate teams’ ability to zero in on and eradicate threats.
Problem: Black box detections limit autonomy
Many security platforms rely on opaque detection algorithms, making it hard to understand the detection logic that led to an alert. This impacts an organization’s ability to customize detection rules for their unique environment, respond to emerging threats, and rule out false positives. It’s the equivalent of giving a detective a list of suspects from an anonymous tip line, but refusing to explain why these people are suspects, and forbidding the detective from seeing the evidence or questioning the witnesses.
Solution: Open source transparency
Choose a CDR solution built on open source standards. Sysdig’s roots are in open source. Sysdig Secure uses Falco, the open source engine trusted for cloud-native runtime security, empowering teams to create, tune, and extend detection rules with full transparency. This transparency and flexibility is critical for teams looking to create custom rules for their unique environment, gain a quick understanding of threat progression, and simplify false positives or false negatives resolution.
Problem: Slow and fragmented incident response
When an attack happens, every second counts — Sysdig’s threat research shows that attacks only need 10 minutes on average to inflict pain. If your tools can’t capture what actually happened during runtime in real time, you’re left scrambling with incomplete or missing forensic data. This is like trying to mount a military counterstrike without understanding who or where the enemy is. Compounding the missing context is the way responsibility for different components of the response process is often distributed between many different teams and individuals, creating silos and blind spots. This leads to operational inefficiencies that inevitably slow multiple business units.
Solution: Automated and granular inline response capabilities
Look for a CDR solution that offers incident response capabilities, including automatic capture of system calls, container activity, and cloud audit trails. Sysdig ensures that forensic evidence is immediately available across both cloud and on-prem environments, enabling faster investigations, containment, and recovery. Sysdig also offers inline response, enabling analysts to kill a malicious process, or stop, pause, or kill a compromised container if those actions are inline with their response workflows.
Problem: Security skill gaps slow down threat response
The cloud security talent shortage is a reality that will not magically disappear — and many teams are already stretched thin. This squeeze exacerbates teams that are already struggling to investigate the high volume of cloud alerts, let alone build and maintain custom detection rules. On top of that, many new analysts migrating from more traditional environments have limited experience working in the cloud and its inherent team approach.
Solution: AI security assistants
Choose a CDR platform that can eliminate skill gaps and accelerate teams with AI-powered assistance. Sysdig integrates AI throughout the platform with Sysdig Sage™. Sysdig Sage’s context-aware capabilities accelerate CDR workflows to help security teams easily understand runtime security events. For instance, analysts can simply ask Sysdig Sage to explain the command lines that triggered a detection. They can also move towards resolution by asking Sysdig Sage for recommended next steps to fix and remediate the threat. This will help users take action faster. Sysdig Sage dramatically reduces time to resolution, empowering teams of any skill level to operate like cloud security experts.
Conclusion
As hybrid and cloud-native environments become the new standard, your security must adapt to protect assets wherever they live — without slowing innovation. The right cloud detection and response platform delivers :
- Deep runtime visibility in real time
- High-fidelity cloud detections with automated correlation and cloud context
- Transparent and customizable detection
- Automated and granular inline response capabilities
- AI-powered assistance to bridge security skill gaps.
Sysdig was purpose-built to meet these demands, giving security teams the ability to detect, respond, and harden across hybrid and multicloud environments.
Ready to see how Sysdig can with detection and response in the cloud?
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