Predictable attacks, unpredictable defenses: why observability is the real security gap

Predictable cyberattacks often succeed due to predictable paths through victimized environments. However, organizational defenses remain unpredictable due to misconfigurations, excessive privileges, exposed services, and unmonitored connections. Defenders struggle with security maps they cannot fully comprehend, as most organizations lack full visibility into how applications, identities, devices, and workloads communicate in hybrid and cloud environments.

This lack of contextual visibility leads to a growing disconnect between detection and action. Attackers exploit this disconnect by targeting weaknesses to move between systems. The average time to contain an incident is around three hours, while the average time to reach critical data and systems after initial breach is only 29 minutes.

AI tools are accelerating this gap, enabling faster and more autonomous attacks. To address this, organizations must rethink their defense posture, focusing on proactive containment by acknowledging that compromise is inevitable and taking steps to reduce risk, as well as reactive containment by rapidly isolating compromised workloads.

Observability is crucial for both proactive and reactive containment, as it provides a complete, accurate picture of the environment's connections and paths of least resistance for attackers.