Skyhawk Security introduced Intelligent Simulation in our platform when we announced the AI-based Purple Team in December 2023. This AI-based platform leverages simulation twins to create virtual replicas of your cloud environment – the architecture, configuration, and cloud security controls. 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. This provides a dynamic and continuous risk assessment of your cloud architecture and enables organizations to take a proactive approach to their cloud security for the very first time.

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. Security teams now address the most impactful CNAPP alerts to reduce cloud risk.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Gartner Research: Intelligent Simulation

Strategic Planning Assumption: “By 2030, at least 15% of enterprises will utilize intelligent simulation for informed decision making.”

Gartner discusses how vendors are using this to fill product gaps in traditional cloud security posture management (CSPM). According to Gartner: “some intelligent simulation providers can create a simulation twin of the infrastructure or cloud environment, enabling a dynamic and continuous risk assessment.”

“Security teams can simultaneously simulate potential attacks (red team) and security defenses (blue team) in real time within a safe, controlled simulation twin environment. Teams can also explore “what-if” scenarios by assessing how changes in configurations or code deployments might affect the overall security posture before being deployed to production. Beyond just simulating attacks, this model can also, as in Skyhawk’s solution, simulate each of the response options and provide the best outcome to help automate and improve cloud security operations.”

Hear from a CISO on how they use Intelligent Simulation to take a proactive approach to cloud security.

Shlomi Czeisler, CISO at IBEX Medical uses Skyhawk Security and he and his team get hours back in their day. Skyhawk Security helps them understand the full picture of their cloud security, which threats are being weaponized, and then prioritize what needs to be addressed by the business value of the asset.

“Alerts are clear, the triage process to confirm the alert is much faster. Skyhawk accelerates the triage process, accelerating the resolution of critical threats.”

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Gartner, Emerging Tech: Intelligent Simulation is Redefining Industry Processes for Greater Value by Walker Black, Ethan Cai, Stacey Yin, Alfonso Velosa, Mark Wah, Published November 27, 2025.

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