Cloud Security Dilemma: More Tools Lead to Increased Weaknesses

The realm of cloud security is experiencing significant turbulence, as highlighted by the findings of ARMO's inaugural survey, 'The State of Cloud Runtime Security'. Conducted with insights from over 300 SecOps stakeholders and cybersecurity leaders, the survey reveals a stark reality: the very tools designed to protect cloud environments are often the source of increased vulnerabilities.

An Overwhelming Volume of Alerts

One of the most alarming revelations from the survey is the sheer volume of alerts that security teams receive. On average, these teams report sifting through approximately 4,080 monthly alerts generated by various cloud security tools. In a jarring statistic, it's shown that for every 7,000 alerts, only one corresponds to a genuine active threat. This massive disparity leads to critical inefficiencies, as teams grapple with alert fatigue, reducing their ability to respond effectively to real security incidents.

The report indicates that 89% of cybersecurity professionals believe their current processes are inadequate in detecting active threats. Furthermore, nearly half of the respondents (46%) admit to battling alert fatigue, while 45% regularly encounter false positives. This ineffective warning system is causing not just frustration but also dangerous blind spots in organizations' security postures.

The Tool Sprawl Effect

A significant contributor to these issues is the phenomenon known as 'tool sprawl'. The survey found that 63% of organizations deploy more than five distinct cloud runtime security tools. This fragmentation creates silos within security operations, making it difficult to correlate alerts between tools. Alarmingly, only 13% of organizations reported successfully correlating alerts across their toolset.

The time it takes to piece together information across these disconnected systems can be excessive, averaging 7.7 days—with some teams taking up to 30 days—to achieve a clear understanding of alerts. This latency further complicates the already daunting task of ensuring cloud security. As a result, crucial performance metrics like mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to response (MTTR) suffer significantly.