What is cloud detection and response?
CDR is a cloud-native approach to identifying, analyzing, and responding to security threats across cloud workloads, services, and infrastructure.
Through threat detection and analysis, CDR provides deep visibility into complex cloud and multi-cloud environments, services, APIs, and every type of workload. This includes VMs, containers, serverless, cloud networking, storage nodes, Kubernetes clusters, and much more.
Cloud detection and response (CDR) focuses on cloud environments, setting it apart from other detection and response approaches. While CDR shares some of the features of workload-focused endpoint detection and response (EDR), network detection and response (NDR), and extended detection and response (XDR), it comes with many more features tailored to the cloud.
Why do you need cloud detection and response?
CDR is essential because traditional security tools weren’t designed for ephemeral cloud assets, dynamic identity layers, and multi-cloud sprawl.
Without CDR, SOC teams face blind spots, alert fatigue, and delayed response to real threats—especially lateral movement, misconfigured identities, and cross-account attacks.
Leading security experts understand that the unique complexity of the cloud necessitates cloud-specific D&R solutions. Following a poll on the need for CDR, Google Cloud security advisor Anton Chuvakin cited the following comment as the strongest argument in favor: “Public cloud has enough special deployment and collection differences from on-prem that there has to be a CDR function.”
And while there is no shortage of detection and security tools on the market, they fail to provide the deep visibility needed to identify and remediate cloud security threats in your environments. Wiz data reveals that 61% of organizations have secrets exposed in public repositories. This and other threats brought by innovation, like AI usage, emphasize the importance of modern and cloud-native CDR.
Reducing alert fatigue
Alerts are key for determining threat prioritization and where to focus remediation efforts. However, many available solutions come with a high rate of false positives, with SOC teams spending an average of 32% of their time on false incident investigations and validations.
A CDR solution reduces alert fatigue by correlating signals from cloud logs, identity activity, and runtime behavior, filtering out benign events and highlighting exploitable threats. These solutions analyze alert severity based on business data and workload priorities by providing full transparency and visibility into complex cloud environments to proactively identify lateral movement attacks via context-aware security intelligence. For example, rather than alerting on every public S3 bucket, CDR focuses on those storing sensitive data or linked to privileged IAM roles
Quick threat analysis and remediation
Manual threat analysis across cloud configurations, network exposures, identity access technologies, and other cloud architecture aspects is far too time-consuming. CDR triggers automated actions such as quarantining workloads, delivering network-access control adaptability, creating asset and network isolation zones, or using approved images to rebuild workloads.
How does CDR work?
CDR works by ingesting telemetry from cloud-native sources like AWS CloudTrail, Kubernetes audit logs, and VM runtime events. It analyzes this data in real time to identify suspicious behaviors like privilege escalation, unusual network traffic, or lateral movement, and then automatically responds based on policy.
These solutions are either agent-based (agents installed on workloads) or agentless (the snapshot-scanning approach) for data collection from block storage and retrieval of cloud configuration metadata contained within APIs. An effective CDR solution should be able to:
Provide real-time visibility across multi-cloud environments to secure your infrastructure. Quick detection and prioritized response guidance help you stay ahead of emerging threats.
Uncover complex exposure chains and lateral movement paths targeting high-value assets like administrator identities or sensitive data. A unified interface paired with a live database of cloud changes supports pinpoint identification of exploitable cross-account and cross-cloud pathways.
Simulate potential network exposures using a continuously updated view of your cloud landscape, allowing deeper risk validation with evidence like response content and status codes to reveal attack vectors.
Continuously monitor cloud activity using rules powered by an evolving threat intelligence database. This fuels precision malware scanning and alerting that’s both custom and accurate.
Respond swiftly with automated containment or by alerting security teams. Security events are prioritized and collected at scale across workloads, including VMs, containers, and serverless functions. This covers attack vectors like IAM, APIs, and other cloud-specific surfaces.
The ideal CDR solution incorporates these aspects into an end-to-end cloud security platform tailored to any cloud ecosystem.
Features to look for in a cloud detection and response solution
Every business has its unique cloud strategy, ecosystem, and priorities. Together with the dynamic nature of complex cloud environments, this requires an automated CDR tool capable of meeting today’s needs and tomorrow’s:
Real-time monitoring and detection across the entire cloud ecosystem: The ability to detect known/unknown threats and suspicious activity, including remote-code execution, malware, cryptomining, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and container escape, is essential.
Real-time response actions: Rapidly respond to and contain unfolding incidents by triggering actions like isolating affected systems, suspending compute instances, or disabling risky configurations. This limits a threat's potential blast radius.
End-to-end visibility: Gain a holistic view with threat correlation across real-time signals, cloud activity, and audit logs to uncover attacker movement in the cloud and drive rapid response and threat remediation.
Out-of-the-box detection for the latest attacks and complex environments: Find a tool that can detect vulnerabilities throughout applications, servers, networking services, runtime cloud, VMs, serverless, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and APIs, among other cloud-environment architecture components. In addition, heuristics-based rule sets should provide transparent and consistent identification of threats.
Attacker simulations that analyze external-environment exposure points: Simulate scenarios, for example, within applications and APIs from outside the cloud environment to provide a deeper understanding of an attacker's behavior. Simulations can validate port- and IP-address exposure status based on current network configurations or API misconfigurations that allow unauthenticated requests or secret/sensitive data exposure.
Integration with existing tools, systems, and environments: A vendor-neutral CDR solution should seamlessly integrate across all CSPs and multi-cloud environments, including systems, CI/CD pipelines, and security tools within the ecosystem. This allows for streamlined data collection, reduces infrastructure complexity, ensures continuity, and helps maintain a consistent, gap-free, infrastructure-wide security posture.
A CDR solution is an essential foundation for a comprehensive cloud security strategy. It should constantly and easily adapt to your unique cloud ecosystem and changing threat landscape.
Can your organization perform forensics at scale for workloads?
Performing cloud threat forensics at scale is a massive undertaking. A strong CDR platform enables forensics at scale by aggregating runtime events, enriching alerts with context (like answering "What was the container doing?"), and maintaining traceability across cloud sessions.
A CDR solution must be able to accommodate dynamic cloud environments, new threat vectors, and changing security strategies.
That’s where Wiz comes in. Wiz is a cloud-native and unified cloud security platform. Its agentless scanning and full-stack toolset detect threats and vulnerabilities within your cloud environment.
Wiz also provides mitigation and remediation action steps with prioritized risk assessments. Wiz offers an intuitive CDR solution that enables complex processes and threat forensics at scale to keep your cloud environment secure.
Try the demo today to see how Wiz can improve your cloud detection and response.
