How Cloud Native Security unites best-of-breed technologies to defend your cloud today (and in the future)

Defending your digital fortress requires increasing attention to securing your cloud. However, cloud security is also one of the most challenging facets of enterprise security.

As a result, existing security solutions are often lagging far behind real-world conditions on the digital battlefield.

It’s essential that digital defenders get to grips with the evolving cloud threat landscape, including emerging attack vectors and techniques and how to prepare for them.

In this newsletter, we’re putting cloud defence under the microscope. As we’ll see, a CNAPP powered by AI can significantly upgrade your Cloud Security Posture Management by actively plugging gaps in your digital estate before they can become exploited.

The cloud: an opportunity for all

Cloud computing offers organisations an amazing opportunity. It can support software development and deployment at a greater scale, speed, and reliability.

This enables a rapid pace of innovation, allowing an organisation to retain (or improve) its position in a competitive world.

New technologies bring new opportunities for malicious actors too, however - thanks to an expanded attack surface and decreasing visibility over complex cloud environments.

Threat actors are innovating too.

Recent years have seen a growing pivot towards the cloud – including worrying new toolkits that help them thrive in this new frontier.

Cloud security trends

• Taking control: Cyberattackers are increasingly modifying and disabling cloud environments and identities.
• Persistence and evasion: Actors such as Roasted 0ktapus (a.k.a.: Scattered Spider) have demonstrated sophisticated techniques for persisting in cloud environments via lateral movement and defence evasion.
• Automation in cloud breaches on the rise: Open-source cyberattack tooling like AlienFox and Androxgh0st now include automated scripts, increasing the velocity of attacks once access is gained.

How to prevent evolving cloud attacks

According to Gartner, 99% of cloud breaches in 2025 will be caused by human error – these are entirely preventable if you can detect the vulnerabilities before attackers do.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) has therefore become an essential tool in dynamically detecting misconfigurations and policy deviations across a scattered cloud environment.

Unfortunately, as powerful as this tooling can be, CSPM is being rapidly outpaced by attackers.

Malicious actors can now create misconfigurations themselves, creating a trail of seemingly unconnected behaviours which may manifest as a series of random-seeming alerts.

Context is everything. Without the ability to see changes in permissions or other misconfiguration as part of a wider attack chain, an organization’s CSPM can quickly become overwhelmed.

To defend against this new class of threat, your cloud security must address 3 unavoidable realities:

1. A single, contextualised view is needed: Organisations must leverage a single platform that gives full visibility across their cloud environments; securing build pipelines, deployment services, identity / IAM, and all endpoints. Moving forwards, it’s essential to bring all activity data into a single, unified perspective that correlates seemingly unrelated events in a scattered landscape.
2. Machine speed is a survival trait: Given the rise of automated attacks, your cloud security must go beyond visibility. It must enable instantaneous reactivity, with the ability to block and respond to malicious actions at machine speed. Best-of-breed cloud security solutions are now available that combine the forensic and interdiction abilities of an agent with the speed and agility of intelligent automation.
3. Security must be sustainable: Organisations must assume that attacks will continue, and they’ll only become more sophisticated and complex over time. Your solution must address the organisation’s need to conserve resources by prioritising actions. Security professionals must have actionable insights that are free from time-wasting false-positives. AI is becoming an essential ingredient for minimising workloads and accelerating responses in a sustainable, resource-optimised way.

Bringing the best solutions together, powered by AI

Through an active process of technology development, partnerships, and acquisitions, SentinelOne has united our agent-based Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CNWPP) with best-of-breed offensive security and other capabilities.

This cloud native security solution is uniquely capable of matching today’s threats; covering every domain in your cloud, from pipelines to endpoints.

We call this Cloud Native Security (CNS) - the most comprehensive CNAPP available.

Cloud Native Security gives you:

• Visibility across your whole environment, moving beyond detection by protecting your most crucial assets.
• Proactively seeks vulnerabilities and eliminates time wasted on false positives by taking an attacker’s perspective to prioritise vulnerabilities that can be used in an attack.
• Uses the SentinelOne Singularity Platform as the AI-powered foundation for comprehensive context-driven cloud native security.
• Correlates activities across all endpoints and identities using the Singularity Data Lake.
• Uses an AI autonomous security analyst working at machine speed to identify and stop malicious activity in real-time.

In addition, our AI powered CNAPP (CNS) includes:

CSPM – identifies misconfigurations, ensures compliance with best practices and industry benchmarks like NIST, MITRE, CIS, and PCI-DSS.

Agentless Vulnerability Scanning - Scans your cloud infrastructure without installing any agent.

Offensive Security Engine - Simulates attacks safely to verify and prioritise genuine exploit paths.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scans - Scans IaC templates and container configurations.

Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM) – K8s container security assured; from code to runtime.

Secrets Scanning – Scans your source code for secret information, preventing credential leakage in public repos.

Gun fight? Better bring a gun then.

Considering the rapidly evolving threats to cloud infrastructure, digital defenders must select a suitable weapon to meet this challenge.

Cloud Native Security addresses the three realities of cloud security with a single platform that covers the entire cloud environment. It leverages security intelligence and AI to work at machine speed - identifying potential threats and prioritising those that can actually be used to compromise your systems.

As a result your cloud workloads are protected in real-time, and security professionals are laser-focused on the tasks with the greatest impact.

At SentinelOne, we constantly monitor the latest trends and tactics, so we can keep one step ahead and keep your critical systems running. Our platform uses its own dedicated AI to hunt for threats and to detect attacks using advanced behavioural analysis. Find out more about SentinelOne here .