Skyhawk Security’s preemptive approach to cloud security began eight years ago with an AI-based detection and response system that tried to preemptively identify live incidents that had the opportunity to develop into a cloud breach. Since then, Skyhawk Security has expanded with an AI-based Purple Team (AI Red Team and AI Blue Team) that offers cloud security capabilities “left of boom” and “right of boom” in a comprehensive cloud security platform that enables a proactive approach to cloud security for the very first time.

A  Gartner® research report makes a statement that, in our opinion, should stop every cloud security leader in their tracks: “Without preemptive cybersecurity, no organization is safe.” The report, Tech FutureSight: Preemptive Cybersecurity is the Only Way to Secure Emerging Attack Surfaces states: “Today’s Global Attack Surface Grid presents a far more expansive, continuously growing, interconnected and complex array of attack surfaces than in the past. It currently exposes a massive number of assets to sophisticated AI-powered cyberattacks.”

Additionally, Crowdstrike’s Global Threat Reportv confirms this as it states that AI-enabled attacks are up 89% year-over-year.

Threat actors are using AI to create better, faster, and more targeted attack. Each threat actor now has an army of AI Agents. If you are not using AI, you are behind your peers, and more importantly, you are behind threat actors.

The Global Attack Surface Grid is Expanding Faster than Ever Before

The Global Attack Surface Grid is defined as an interconnected web of attack surfaces that includes multi-cloud, IoT devices, AI systems, APIs, and much more.  Gartner projects that “by 2030, due to the rapid growth of the GASG, there will be over 1 million documented cybersecurity Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), up over 300% from approximately 277,000 in 2025.”. For any organization relying on a patch-and-respond strategy, that number is not a challenge to be managed. It is a structural impossibility.

According to Gartner, “The challenge of defending the GASG has transcended the DR approach and now requires preemptive cybersecurity capabilities.”

This is precisely the environment Skyhawk was designed for. Our AI platform does not attempt to process every vulnerability. It continuously simulates how a real adversary would move through your specific cloud environment, right now, given its current state, and surfaces the handful of findings that represent a genuine, end-to-end attack path to your most critical assets. As the volume of CVEs grows toward a million, the ability to identify the few that actually matter becomes not just valuable, but essential.

Detect and Respond is not sufficient

The increased speed, sophistication, and scope of AI-enabled threats is actively destroying the reliability of existing DR approaches. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that vulnerability exploitation increased 34% year-over-year due to AI-driven threats. And 87% of surveyed security professionals reported that their organizations have already experienced AI-driven cyberattacks.

The Gartner report states: “Preemptive cybersecurity is no longer optional — security product leaders must act now and embed it into their roadmaps as a fundamental imperative, not a future consideration.”

Skyhawk’s AI Red Team operates on exactly this principle. By running continuous adversarial simulations against a digital twin of your cloud environment, we give security teams the attacker’s view of their infrastructure, not after a breach has occurred, but continuously, before one can happen. This is preemptive cybersecurity in practice: not waiting to detect an attack but understanding in advance which paths an attacker would take and closing them before they can be exploited.

The digital twin is a digital copy of your cloud architecture and cloud security controls. The digital twin is not a one-for-one copy, it is an AI-based representation. The AI Red Team then creates attacks to give you the adversarial view of your cloud security controls. These are not pre-scripted attacks, these are attacks designed for your cloud and the behave as a threat actor, dynamically manipulating the cloud environment to gain access to your most valuable cloud assets. As this is done within our SaaS platform, there is no impact to your production.

The Gartner report states: “There will be a shift from broad, one-size-fits-all DR security platforms toward more targeted and effective preemptive cybersecurity solutions (many of which will be based on agentic AI and DSLMs). This focus on niche areas will present many opportunities for new and existing security vendors to carve out distinct market segments by deeply understanding the unique security challenges of specific verticals, particular application types, and specific threat actor methodologies.”

In our opinion, this is a description of what Skyhawk has been building since inception. Our platform is not a general-purpose security tool with cloud features bolted on. It is a purpose-built, cloud-native AI system with eight years of development focused on one domain: understanding how adversaries think and operate inside cloud environments. Our AI agents are trained on thousands of cloud-specific Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. They do not pattern-match against generic threat signatures, they reason about what an attacker could actually do in your environment, given your specific IAM structure, network topology, deployed services, and compensating controls.

Preemptive Security Spend will be 50% of all IT Security Spending

We believe, for security leaders evaluating their cloud security strategy today, this trajectory has a clear implication: the tools you invest in now should be building toward preemptive capability, not doubling down on reactive approaches that Gartner has identified as structurally insufficient.

Skyhawk’s AI-based cloud security platform, with its digital twin simulation engine, adversarial AI agents, and continuous attack path prioritization, is purpose-built for this future. We are not adapting a detection product to add preemptive features. Preemptive, adversarial intelligence is what we have always done.

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Want to go deeper? Read our differentiators whitepaper for the full picture, then book a meeting with our team to discuss your specific environment

Gartner subscribers can read the full report at https://www.gartner.com 

Gartner, Tech FutureSight: Preemptive Cybersecurity is the Only Way to Secure Emerging AI Attack Surfaces, by Carl Manion, Luis Castillo, Matt Milone, Charanpal Bhogal, Mark Wah, Travis Lee, Esha Bhatia, Walker Black, Elizabeth Kim, David Senf, Tom Powledge, Isy Bangurah published May 9, 2026.

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