In most cyberattacks, the real challenge doesn’t begin at the point of entry—it starts afterward. Once cybercriminals infiltrate a system, they move laterally across networks, testing access points, escalating privileges, and expanding control until a small breach becomes a full-scale compromise. Despite decades of technological progress, the core lesson remains: total prevention is impossible, and it’s the spread of an attack that does the deepest damage.
Illumio’s 2025 Global Cloud Detection and Response Report echoes this reality. Although many organizations claim to monitor east-west traffic and hybrid communications, few possess the contextual clarity to interpret the data effectively. Collecting logs and flow metrics is easy; understanding which workloads interact—and whether that interaction poses a risk—is where visibility breaks down.
Illumio founder and CEO Andrew Rubin highlighted this disconnect: “Everybody loves to say that we’ve got a data or a telemetry problem. I actually think that may be the biggest fallacy of all. We have more data and telemetry than we’ve ever had. The problem is we haven’t figured out how to use it in a highly efficient, highly effective way.”
The report reveals how overwhelmed security teams are by alert fatigue. Thousands of daily notifications—many of them false positives—leave analysts sifting through noise, hoping to identify the few signals that matter. Some describe it as “alert triage roulette,” where the odds of catching a genuine attack indicator are slim.
This inefficiency is costly. Missed alerts lead to prolonged downtime and severe financial losses. Rubin stressed that attackers often stay hidden for months: “Attackers are getting in. They’re literally moving into our house and living with us for months, totally undetected. That means we’re flying blind.”
Despite the adoption of advanced tools like CDR, NDR, XDR, SIEM, and SOAR, blind spots persist. The cybersecurity industry keeps adding layers of detection, but without correlation and context, more data simply amplifies the noise.
Shifting the Security Focus
The narrative now needs to move from “more detection” to “greater observability and containment.” Observability provides enriched context—who’s accessing what, from where, and how critical it is—across clouds and data centers, visualizing potential attack paths and blast radii. Containment acts on that insight, ideally through automation, to isolate or block threats before they escalate.
Rubin summarized it succinctly: “If you want to limit the blast radius of an attack, there are only two things you can do: find it quickly, and segment the environment. They are the only controls that help.”
Heading into 2026, organizations are prioritizing AI and machine learning integration, cloud detection and response, and faster incident remediation. As Rubin noted, AI is transforming both defense and offense in cybersecurity: “AI is going to be a tool in the hands of both the defenders and the attackers forever. In the short term, the advantage probably goes to those who operate outside the rule of law. The one thing we can do to combat that is better observability and finding things faster than we have in the past.”
Ultimately, the report reinforces one truth: visibility without understanding is useless. Companies that convert visibility into context, and context into containment, will stay ahead. In cybersecurity, speed and clarity will always triumph over noise and volume.
