Cloud Security Disciplines Converge to Effectively Prevent Cloud Breaches

We attended an info session at security conference and this slide caught my eye – because all of the trends here center around preemptive threat detection. At Skyhawk Security, we started our journey to a proactive and preemptive approach to cloud security in 2023 with the introduction of our Continuous Autonomous Purple Team, and it seems that others are realizing this is the only want to stop cloud breaches. This is especially true when threat actors leverage AI to create better faster and stronger attacks.

If you look a bit more closely, you see that three of these four capabilities are part of Skyhawk’s platform, providing a comprehensive approach to stop cloud breaches. Let’s dig deeper.

Reactive detection meets proactive security.

This is exactly where Skyhawk Security started in 2023 – with the Continuous Autonomous Purple Team. Skyhawk’s Cloud Threat Detection and Response leverages AI and ML to deliver very early detections to prevent incidents from becoming cloud breaches. With the AI-based Red Team introduced to continuously test the security controls – now we can see where there are vulnerabilities and weakness in the cloud attack surface and the security controls. Skyhawk introduced a layer of context, the business value of the asset behind the security weakness. Now security teams know where there are weaponized threats, the threats that are not just exploitable, but if exploited put the business at risk.

Three of the four points align with Skyhawk’s capabilities.

Identity defense: Skyhawk’s Interactive CDR introduces principles of Zero Trust by going to the cloud asset owner. It goes to the single source of truth – the owner who can confirm if the activities are malicious or not. This provides the context security teams need to act, so they are not wasting their time and resources on non-issues.

Threat detection identifies exposures: The purple team identifies CVEs and weaknesses in the cloud attack surface. Skyhawk goes one step further by prioritizing the weaknesses based on the business value of the asset that is exposed. The contextualization of the vulnerability by the risk to the business ensures security teams are focused on reducing risk to the business. The platform does this continuously, even as security controls and cloud architecture changes.

Preemptive Cloud Security: The purple team helps organizations take a proactive approach to cloud security for the very first time. The rehearsed attacks proactively identify the “low hanging fruit” that threat actors will exploit to breach your cloud. The purple team then identifies two key ways to preemptively stop the incident:

- Detection models are updated to find the threatening behavior faster.

- The cloud architecture is updated so threat actors cannot leverage the weaponized exposure to breach your cloud.

Many teams and constant change.

There are many roles involved in cloud security and each has their own responsibilities and their own view of the cloud with their own tools. The security team and SOC will find the issue – but typically can’t implement it. DevOps is needed to actually implement the cloud changes that mitigate the identified risk. This is another key issue mentioned in the 2025 Cloud Security Report. There is constant technological change, there are not enough resources, and adding another layer – cloud architecture can change fast. Tool fragmentation and lack of integration amongst tools exacerbate blind spots.

Why do we see cloud security tools converge?

Cloud security is much more complex than on-prem security because the cloud needs to be accessible, yet secure, and in most cases, locking down accessibility improves security. These two characteristics are diametrically opposed. Skyhawk is not the only vendor seeing this key trend. Recent findings in the 2025 Checkpoint Cloud Security Report show that cloud adoption outpaces cloud security readiness.

Securing the cloud does not require a single piece of information – many data points need to be correlated and contextualized to determine the priority and impact. Security teams struggle with this and we see this in the number of tools deployed. In the same article, 71% of respondents rely on over 10 different cloud security tools, creating 500 daily alerts.

Security teams need a tool that prioritizes these alerts. Asking someone to review and evaluate 500 tasks on a daily basis is overwhelming and impossible. Skyhawk Security can review these alerts, even alerts form other tools, and provide critical context so security teams know what to do first as the platform looks at the business value of the exposed asset.

Skyhawk Security delivers a proactive and preemptive approach to cloud security.

Enable collaboration and context so all cloud security teams are able to support the common goal to reduce business risk

Realize a preemptive approach to cloud security with the Purple Team

Eliminate alert fatigue with verified alerts that show all the evidence of what is happening and how it is truly a threat to the business

AI-based red team leverages a simulation digital twin to identify vulnerabilities and exposures that exist across the cloud attack surface with no impact to production