CDR is the Future—But not as a bolt-on the CSPM

In the past month, Palo Alto (Cortex Cloud), Wiz (Wiz Defend) and CrowdStrike announced their move into the Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) space. Their promise? A single solution that integrates real-time agent-based detection with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM).

On paper, it sounds like a perfect match. But in reality? This is a toxic combination.

CSPM was never built for detection and response. It was built for prioritization. Trying to bolt real-time response onto a static, scan-based system doesn’t just fall short—it actively misleads security teams.

It’s like trying to drive in a new city with a GPS that only updates once a day. It’s fine when you’re planning ahead. But when you’re in the middle of an emergency? That outdated map leads you straight into a dead end.

This is not the future of cloud security. It’s a platformization play disguised as innovation.

Let’s break down why this approach is fundamentally flawed and what security teams really need.

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1. The Cloud Layer Moves Too Fast for CSPM

Attackers have figured out something security vendors don’t want to admit—cloud security isn’t just about workloads, it’s about configurations.

By modifying network reachability, identity permissions, or resource associations, attackers can expand their blast radius in seconds.

But CSPM operates on periodic snapshots—meaning it only captures cloud posture at a single moment in time. If an adversary makes a critical change between scans, your security stack won’t reflect the new attack surface.

That means an attack can unfold right under your nose, and CSPM will still tell you everything is fine. In fact, it happens all the time. Over 60% of attacks originate in the cloud, and in just seconds ,an attacker can pivot laterally—expanding their reach before security teams even realize there’s a problem. And with generative AI in the mix, the problem only gets worse.

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2. CSPM Fails to Capture the Full Attack Path

CSPM was designed to prioritize vulnerabilities, not to track real-time attack paths. That means the security picture is incomplete by design.

Imagine moving to a new city. Your GPS knows how to get from your house to work and from your house to the grocery store. But when you need to go from work to the grocery store, you’re stuck.

That’s exactly what happens with CSPM-driven security. It builds attack paths based on known vulnerabilities but ignores dynamic changes across:

• Identity configurations

• Network paths

• Runtime modifications

This means most real-world attack paths are invisible to CSPM. Adversaries don’t need exploits when they can simply change configurations to achieve lateral movement.

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3. The Inventory Problem: Ephemeral Assets Break CSPM

Cloud assets are ephemeral—they spin up and down constantly. If your detection system relies on CSPM’s last scan, the asset you’re investigating might not even exist anymore.

Example:

An alert is triggered on an IP address.

A CSPM-driven approach will try to map it to an asset using the last scan. But without an event-driven system, security teams are forced to manually reconstruct what actually happened.

• What was this IP tied to an hour ago?

• Did it change roles or permissions in the meantime?

• Was it exposed to the internet after the last scan?

Without real-time cloud modeling, even basic incident response becomes a guessing game.

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4. The Platformization Trap: Are You Buying Security or Just Another SKU?

Here’s the real kicker: Palo Alto and Wiz are not just integrating real-time agents with CSPM—they are forcing you to use their CSPM if you want their CDR solution.

Think about what that means.

If they truly believed in real-time cloud security, why lock it behind their CSPM? Why not let security teams use real-time detection with any cloud security stack?

The answer is simple: it’s not about security—it’s about platformization.

These vendors built billion-dollar businesses on CSPM. Now that CDR is the next frontier, they don’t want to lose their CSPM foothold. But it’s more than that—they aren’t interested in investing in true, next-generation CDR. Instead, they’re running a packaging exercise, slapping a new label on old tech, and disguising it as CDR to monetize their existing customer base further. If CSPM was enough, there would be no need for CDR.

• If their CDR was truly real-time, they wouldn’t need CSPM as a crutch.

• If security was the priority, they wouldn’t force you into their platform to get detection and response.

Security teams don’t need a CSPM tax disguised as CDR. They need real, vendor-agnostic detection and response.

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5. Logs Alone Won’t Save You

Many cloud security solutions analyze logs one by one—without correlating them to real-time posture. Attackers exploit this blind spot by flooding logs with fake signals, making real threats harder to spot. Real-time context isn’t just about collecting more logs—it’s about stitching together identity, network, and configuration changes as they happen.

Without that, security teams are drowning in data but still missing the attack.

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6. The “So What?” Problem—When Logs Don’t Tell You the Impact

One of the biggest failures of CSPM-driven security is how it reports configuration changes.

Example:
An attacker assigns a security group with internet access to a sensitive asset.
A CSPM-driven system logs this as:
“New security group assigned to asset X.”
What does that actually mean? Nothing.
What security teams really need to know is:
“Asset X is now exposed to the internet. This asset contains PII data.”

This is the difference between static snapshots and real-time context. CSPM tells you what changed—but not why it matters.

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7. Static Posture Fails During an Incident

When a breach happens, security teams need to answer one urgent question:

“Was data leaked?”

Step one is figuring out which assets were exposed to the internet. But if your detection stack relies on CSPM snapshots, you’re querying yesterday’s posture. If that scan happened hours ago, your answer is already outdated.

Security teams need event-driven posture tracking, not a security camera that takes a picture once a day.

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8. Auto-Responding Based on the Wrong Posture is a Recipe for Disaster

Security automation is powerful—when it’s built on accurate, real-time context. But when response actions are triggered based on outdated or incomplete posture data, it creates more problems than it solves.

Here’s what happens in a CSPM-driven model:

1. A misconfigured security group is flagged as "high risk"—but CSPM only scanned it hours ago.

2. Automated response kicks in, removing access, shutting down workloads, or revoking permissions based on that old posture snapshot.

3. The posture had already changed since the last scan—meaning the response action is now irrelevant, disruptive, or even harmful.

This isn’t just a theoretical risk—it directly impacts availability, trust, and business continuity.

• DevOps teams lose trust in security when auto-remediation disrupts production for no valid reason.

• Security teams lose credibility when their own tools create downtime instead of solving security problems.

• Attackers exploit this confusion, knowing that outdated posture models lead to security gaps and misfires.

CDR isn’t just about detecting threats—it’s about responding correctly, at the right time, with the right context. If your response mechanism is based on yesterday’s cloud state, you’re not securing the cloud—you’re risking it.

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The Only Answer: A Fully Real-Time Approach You Can’t Shortcut Your Way to Real-Time Security

CDR is an urgent need, but bolting it onto CSPM doesn’t solve the problem—it just creates more confusion.

You can’t slap Prisma onto Cortex and call it real-time security.
You can’t duct-tape Gem onto Wiz and expect true Cloud Detection and Response.
And you can't call it CrowdStrike complete when it's missing real-time posture.

That’s not innovation. That’s marketing.

If you want real-time, event-driven cloud security, you have to build for it from the start.

Security teams need:

• Event-driven cloud security – where changes in network, identity, and assets are tracked continuously, not in snapshots.
• Full cloud mapping – so every asset, permission, and reachability change is understood in real time.
• Attack path detection in real time – showing how an attacker can move right now, not how they could have moved 12 hours ago.

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That’s why we built Stream Security.

• Real-time Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) that continuously models cloud environments.
• CloudTwin technology that tracks every change—past, present, and future—so security teams always have full context.
• Dynamic attack path analysis that updates instantly as adversaries modify reachability and identity.

Palo Alto, Wiz and CrowdStrike stepping into CDR validates the need for real-time security. But without event-driven modeling, security teams will continue chasing shadows.

The cloud moves in real time. Security should too.

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