Enterprises operate in an increasingly complex cloud environment, with critical assets spread across SaaS applications like GitHub, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Office 365, alongside cloud infrastructure in AWS, GCP, and Azure. Identity, data, and workloads are increasingly interconnected and dependent upon each other to be effective, but security teams often lack a unified panoramic view, leaving organizations vulnerable to often simple yet devastating attacks.

To effectively detect and respond to cloud threats, a complete, real-time view across SaaS, identity, and infrastructure that allows security teams to track threats as they move across different cloud environments isn’t just a good security practice—it’s a must. Traditional security approaches, including CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) and SSPM (SaaS Security Posture Management), fail to provide the real-time, cross-domain context needed to stop attackers. Without modern CDR capabilities, SecOps will be trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What SecOps has done historically to keep your organization secure has stopped working in today’s cloud-SaaS reality.

The Limitations of CSPM, SSPM, and Real-Time Agents

For years, organizations have relied on CSPM to detect misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure and SSPM to secure SaaS applications. While these solutions help with compliance and governance, they are snapshots in time, and only offer simplistic, periodic posture scans rather than real-time visibility into actual ongoing threats. It’s like trying to understand the plot of a movie by only seeing a few frames.

To compensate, some security teams layer real-time threat detection capabilities and agents onto these tools. However, this approach introduces new challenges:

• Deployment Complexity & Coverage Gaps – Agents are difficult to deploy uniformly across cloud environments, can introduce performance impacts, break operational dependencies, and are not an option for most SaaS applications, leaving significant blind spots.‍
• Lack of Context Across Domains – CSPM focuses on infrastructure, while SSPM looks at SaaS configurations. Neither solution alone can detect attacks that almost always pivot across both.
• Inefficiency Against Modern Threats – Attackers don’t break in. They exploit identity weaknesses, API integrations, and misconfigurations in real time to simply log in.

As a result, these traditional approaches fail to provide the comprehensive, real-time detection and response capabilities that today’s cloud security teams depend on for efficient and effective SecOps on par, if not better than what they have with on-prem controls.

Why Agentless, Panoramic Visibility is the Only Viable CDR Approach

The only way to detect and respond to modern cloud attacks is through an agentless approach that provides real-time, single-picture visibility across SaaS, identity, and infrastructure. Here’s why:

• Identity is the Common Thread in Cloud Attacks – Most breaches start with compromised credentials. Detecting identity-based attacks requires monitoring across cloud and SaaS—not just within one silo.
• Agentless Solutions Reduce Operational Burden – Unlike agents, which are difficult to deploy and maintain, an agentless approach provides continuous monitoring across all cloud and SaaS assets.
• Cross-Domain Threat Correlation is Key – A single compromised OAuth token in GitHub could lead to an attack spreading into AWS or Azure. Only a panoramic security model can detect these multi-vector threats in real time.

The Mitiga Perspective on Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)

At Mitiga, we’ve seen firsthand that effective cloud security requires more than just posture management—it demands real-time forensic visibility across SaaS, identity, and infrastructure. Attackers don’t operate within traditional security boundaries, so neither should detection.

By embracing agentless, panoramic visibility, organizations can finally close the gaps left by CSPM, SSPM, and real-time agents—ensuring that cloud threats are detected and responded to promptly as they unfold. Because anything less puts advantage squarely in the hands of bad actors.

Curious to learn more about modern Cloud Detection and Response solutions? Get in touch with a Mitiga representative.