Beyond Visibility: Why Cloud Security Must Shift to Enforcement + Control

The cloud is expanding at an unprecedented scale, yet the security industry is still stuck in the visibility trap; obsessed with tools that show you what’s wrong but leave the hard work of fixing it entirely up to you.

This visibility-first obsession has become a liability. Security teams are drowning in alert fatigue, manually chasing thousands of misconfigurations and threats across sprawling cloud environments. And the problem isn’t getting better; it’s getting worse.

CSPM tools show you misconfigurations. SIEM platforms flood you with events. Governance tools highlight compliance gaps. It’s all useful data and great products, but none of it secures anything until action is taken.

And that’s the root cause behind so many cloud breaches; not because companies lacked visibility, but because they lacked enforcement.

According to Gartner" "Enterprises spent over $12 billion on cloud security in 2024, but 80% of cloud breaches still come from issues that visibility tools detected but failed to enforce."        

Real-World Breaches That Visibility Didn’t Stop

The security industry has spent billions of dollars on visibility tools, yet breaches continue to happen for the same reason: visibility alone doesn’t prevent attacks.

Consider some of the most widely reported cloud breaches in recent years:

• A leading financial services company suffered a breach when a cloud firewall misconfiguration exposed sensitive customer data. The issue was detected, but without automated enforcement, the door stayed open.
• A global ride-sharing platform was compromised after attackers stole VPN credentials and moved laterally across cloud environments. Logs captured the movement, but no automated controls were in place to cut off access in real time.
• A top automotive manufacturer inadvertently exposed millions of customer records due to an open cloud storage bucket; a classic example of visibility tools detecting the issue, but enforcement never following through.

Every one of these was a visibility success; and an enforcement failure.

“Visibility without enforcement is like having a security camera, but no lock on your door.”

Why SOAR Isn’t the Fix We Hoped For

SOAR tried to fill this gap by adding automation, which is helpful in many cases. But the reality is that most SOAR deployments turn into glorified playbook builders; brittle, domain-agnostic, and still dependent on human-built workflows.

SOAR, in many cases, doesn’t natively understand cloud-specific domain knowledge and context, such as identity, dynamic workloads, or complex entitlements. It’s a Band-Aid, not a cure.

AI Changes the Game; Especially for Visibility

Where the industry needs to go, and fast is a true visibility + automated enforcement architecture.

This means tools shouldn’t just tell you what’s wrong; they should have the intelligence and control points to actively enforce, auto-remediate, or protect, in real-time. Not days later, not after a manual ticket gets triaged, but as close to the point of detection as possible.

And this is where the future gets even more exciting.

With specialized LLMs becoming mainstream, the analysis side of security is getting a serious upgrade. AI can:

• Spot patterns faster
• Auto-correlate risks across identity, infrastructure, and data
• Answer natural language questions like: “CISO: What are my top risks across all clouds right now?”

That’s great progress. Faster, Better, Cheaper!!

But the next evolution is about automated enforcement; this is where product architecture matters most.

In a nutshell: No Control = No Enforcement = No Real Security

Here’s the core principal security leaders need to internalize:

If platform’s architecture doesn’t control the policy enforcement point ; whether that’s the network, identity layer, or workload ; it can’t actually secure anything.

“Visibility without control is just a dashboard and Dashboards don’t stop breaches”

Why Architecture Matters More Than Ever

This is exactly why platform vendors with built-in control points will win the next decade.

Vendors like:

• Palo Alto – Network security and policy enforcement
• Cisco – Network and security convergence
• Aviatrix – Cloud networking with embedded security policies
• Britive – Just-in-time access and cloud identity enforcement
• CrowdStrike – Workload and endpoint protection

… and more.

They don’t just observe; they have portfolio and product to also do enforcements.

One catch though especially for Legacy vendors is to first be relevant in the cloud with cloud-native enforcement. Staying anchored in data center thinking and approaches, they will become irrelevant in cloud-first security.

The Future: Detect, Assess, and Protect

Automated Today, Autonomous Tomorrow

The future of cloud security is:

• Detect: Identify and surface risks in real time
• Assess: AI delivers curated, prioritized risks ; no noise
• Protect: Either you approve fixes, or pre-built enforcement policies automatically correct the posture before it becomes a risk

That’s visibility and enforcement working together; the only sustainable approach at cloud scale.

“If the security platform can’t enforce, it’s just watching the breach happen.”

Final Thought: From Reports to Real-Time Action

For too long, security has been stuck in reporting mode:

• Finding risks
• Writing reports
• Checking compliance boxes

That model breaks down in the cloud, especially when you factor in massive scale and constantly changing environments. Manual, human-based incident response simply can’t keep up.

Cloud security must shift from:

• Finding risks → Fixing risks
• Writing reports → Enforcing policies in real time

Because at the end of the day, no attacker was ever stopped by a compliance dashboard.

Would love to know your thoughts in this exciting era of incredible technological transformation.