Skyhawk Security’s intelligent simulation represents a paradigm shift in cloud security, moving from a reactive to a preemptive defense posture. This innovative approach leverages a digital twin of an organization’s cloud environment to run continuous, non-disruptive attack simulations. By creating a complete, AI-based duplicate of the cloud infrastructure, Skyhawk’s platform can validate security controls and identify weaponized exposures without any impact on production systems. The core of this technology is an AI-driven Purple Team, which combines automated Red Team attack scenarios with Blue Team threat detection and response capabilities. This integrated approach allows organizations to proactively identify and prioritize vulnerabilities based on business risk, continuously validate the effectiveness of their security controls, and rehearse attack scenarios to enable preemptive threat detection.

Intelligent Simulation by Skyhawk Security provides a competitive advantage over threat actors as it simulates real-world attacks, taking into account the cloud architecture, cloud security, controls, identities, permissions and other cloud security factors to accurately predict threat actor behavior. Threat actors are using AI to create better, faster, and more believable attacks. Skyhawk Security fights AI with AI for true cloud risk reduction.

According to Gartner: “among a flurry of hundreds, Gartner has identified 30 emerging technologies that increasingly shape societies and the enterprises working within them.” Skyhawk Security was mentioned in Intelligent Simulation.

Intelligent Simulation: According to Gartner, why is this important?

 “Increasing enterprise adoption of digital twins coupled with AI is resulting in advanced simulation capabilities that provide significantly deeper insights, optimization, cost savings and reduced risk. Though nascent, intelligent simulation solutions hold the potential for highly contextualized insights and will be capable of learning from and adapting to their environment of operation. Intelligent simulation will enable nearly full autonomous operation, with solutions capable of developing, assessing and acting upon both day-to-day and strategic-level decisions.”

 How does Intelligent Simulation by Skyhawk Security help you?

  • Reduce CNAPP Alert Noise: AI-based Red Team provides an adversarial view of exposures and vulnerabilities to prioritize them based on both the technical severity and the business value of the at-risk asset. Skyhawk was able to take 500,000 CNAPP alerts down to 300 that matter. Security teams now address the most impactful CNAPP alerts to reduce cloud risk. Skyhawk delivers this continuously, so as the cloud architecture and cloud security controls change, so do the exposures. Skyhawk ensures the most pressing exposures are addressed right now.
  • Solve the credential problem: Threat actors are not breaking in, they are logging in. While traditional scanning and static analysis can help find some of these gaps, they are insufficient on their own. Intelligent simulation, on the other hand, is designed to uncover these identity-based attack paths. It reveals how a compromised identity could be used to escalate privileges and traverse your cloud, giving you the insights needed to lock down these critical pathways before they can be exploited.
  • Not all critical alerts are actually critical: Context matters. We heard this story repeatedly at re:Invent. A DevOps team receives a critical alert from their CNAPP and is told to drop everything and fix it immediately. The team scrambles, only to discover that the “critical” vulnerability is in a test environment that is no longer in use. While the issue should eventually be addressed, it poses no immediate threat to the business. This is a classic example of how a lack of context can undermine security efforts. Without understanding the business context of an asset, it’s impossible to accurately assess its risk. Skyhawk Security enriches security alerts with this crucial business context, allowing you to distinguish between a critical vulnerability in a production environment and a low-risk issue in a development sandbox.
  • Security Control Validation: Skyhawk’s Simulation Twins create dynamic, virtual replicas of the cloud architecture and security controls and utilize real-time data to simulate attacks and defenses to prove where defenses will hold and where they will not. The cloud security team now knows what to update, remediate, and fix to prevent cloud breaches. The remediation and updating of security controls is further prioritized by the business value of the at-risk asset for true cloud risk reduction. With Skyhawk Security, security controls are strengthened to reduce threat exposure.
  • Audit and Compliance Assurance: Continuous evidence and support for DORA, SOC2, ISO 27001, and NIST 800-53, to deliver one trusted should of cloud compliance that is always up to date.
  • Operationalize Continuous Threat Exposure Management for the Cloud: Skyhawk Security operationalizes the programmatic approach to threat exposure in the cloud in a single platform. It continuously evaluates the threat exposure and prioritizes those exposures based on the business value of the at-risk asset for true cloud risk reduction.

 

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Gartner, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2025 by Christian Stephan, Jason Wong, Marty Resnick, Published August 5, 2025.

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