From small businesses seeking to cut costs to corporate innovation centers launching digital transformation projects, the large-scale journey to the cloud has fundamentally reshaped the digital business and the traditional paradigm of the network perimeter. As this perimeter dissolves, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure has become a part of the furniture of an increasingly diverse digital estate, empowering organizations to push the upper limits of innovation while expanding the attack surface at an alarming rate.

This trend of course represents the double-edged sword of the digital age, and the security challenges that business leaders must face on their journey to the cloud are difficult to overstate. The ‘cloud’ itself encompasses a wide range of systems and services, and a single security team can often be responsible for securing cloud workloads across AWS and Azure, email communications in Office 365, customer data in Salesforce, file sharing via Dropbox, and virtualized servers in traditional on-premise data centers.

This complex patchwork of cloud-based platforms often fuels efficiency, flexibility, and innovation at the cost of a coherent and tractable security strategy. The cloud in all its various forms is unfamiliar territory for traditional security teams, and prior tools and practices are often too slow, siloed, or not even applicable to defend hybrid and multi-cloud environments against advanced attacks.

And while many cloud-native security solutions can often help with compliance and log-based analytics, they are rarely robust and unified enough to provide sufficient coverage – both because they continue to encourage a ‘stove-pipe’ approach to security, and because they rely on rules, signatures, or prior assumptions and therefore fail to detect novel threats and subtle insiders before they have time to escalate into a crisis.