When security teams say they “see the cloud,” what they often mean is they see pieces of it: logs, workloads, alerts, and maybe some configuration snapshots. But that isn’t cloud context.

The Layer Left Behind in Security

When organizations migrated to the cloud, developers led the transformation. They rehosted, replatformed, and rebuilt infrastructure around scalable APIs, ephemeral services, and complex identity structures. In contrast, security teams lifted and shifted legacy tooling into this new environment. SIEMs were extended to ingest cloud logs. EDRs were deployed on virtual machines. SOAR playbooks were tweaked to trigger cloud-specific actions. On the surface, these changes suggested readiness.

But what they didn’t bring along was visibility into context.

Traditional tools remained focused on hosts, endpoints, and raw log ingestion. As infrastructure became dynamic and identity-driven, these tools lacked the capability to understand how one event influenced another. A suspicious login, policy modification, or data access might all be logged, but without the cloud context to correlate them, they remain just noise.

The result? Security teams are left working with fragments: alerts that lack meaning, logs that lack relevance, and incidents that unfold invisibly between the lines.

What Cloud Context Really Means

Cloud context refers to connections within the layered structure of the cloud itself, including identities, configurations, network paths, workloads, and Kubernetes clusters.

Security teams need visibility into how these layers connect. When tracked continuously, changes in cloud context – both malicious and not – make up the full path of cloud activity. In the case of a breach, understanding how attackers cross, manipulate, and exploit the cloud itself provides context for attack paths and blast radius measurements.

Traditional security tools don’t have visibility into the cloud and therefore miss the layers that connect and contextualize the alerts they send to security teams.

Today’s Threat Actors Thrive in the Cloud Context Layer

Modern attackers aren’t only dropping malware payloads. They escalate privileges, pivot across accounts, modify routes, and assume roles. These are called cloud-conscious attackers, and their behavior is almost invisible to tools that only monitor logs or endpoints.

Threats now live in the space between workloads: in trust policies, IAM roles, VPC routes, and misconfigured security groups. The cloud context layer is the blind spot that can enable the most severe breach.

Imagine an adversary who:

• Assumes a role using legitimate credentials.
• Modifies a policy to gain access to a production workload.
• Opens a port in a security group.
• Exfiltrates sensitive data via an allowed service.

Each step might look benign on its own. But together, it forms an attack storyline. And only with cloud context monitored in real time can you see the full picture.

How It Works: A Real-World Example

Let’s say an attacker compromises a developer’s credentials and assumes a role.

In a typical setup:

• Your SIEM logs the role assumption.
• Your EDR sees no activity, because the attacker isn’t on a workload (yet).
• Your CSPM is unaware, as nothing has violated a static policy (yet).

Without complete visibility into cloud context, this event looks benign.

Stream.Security’s CloudTwin™, a continuously updated replica of your entire cloud that is the basis of Stream’s detection and response engine, provides teams with that visibility in order to see full attack paths across cloud layers. By correlating actions using timing, access paths, and behavior to show how one change leads to the next in an attack, Stream reveals how activity and architecture interact. Analysts using Stream can instantly see enriched attack paths to determine root cause, attack blast radius, and response options.

Stream’s CDR platform reveals a unified breach narrative that integrates data from security tools as well as cloud data:

• Role Assumption Detected: A previously dormant IAM role is suddenly assumed from an unusual IP address at an unusual hour.
• Configuration Change Tracked: Moments later, the attacker modifies a security group, opening access to an internal service.
• Lateral Movement Identified: Using the newly exposed pathway, the attacker queries an internal API and accesses a workload linked to sensitive data.
• Impact Analyzed: Cloud context maps the potential blast radius of the role and determines it has access to multiple production resources. This breach was a high-risk privilege escalation incident and not an isolated role assumption.
• Response Recommended: SecOps teams are alerted with a clear storyline: who did what, when, why it matters, and what action to take next.

What looks like five disconnected alerts to legacy tools is actually a single, coherent attack path. The CloudTwin™ displays this progression, showing both attacker intent and breach blast radius all in real time.

Why Cloud Context Changes Everything

When you integrate cloud context into your security workflow, you fundamentally change how your team works. Instead of spending hours correlating isolated alerts, analysts act on complete narratives.

Cloud context reveals the hidden relationships between identity, configuration, and infrastructure that determine whether an event is benign or a breach in progress. Full visibility across cloud layers removes false positives not by filtering alerts, but by showing which ones lead to meaningful change - and which don’t. By enriching alerts with cloud context, security teams can understand what changed in the cloud, who changed it, what it exposed, and why it matters.

Goodbye Guesswork. Hello Precision.

Cloud context is not a “nice to have.” It is the missing visibility layer that traditional tools weren’t built to understand. It enriches what your SIEM logs. It gives your EDR broader perspective. It tells your response tools what the right action is, not just what might be possible.

Stream.Security brings complete cloud context in real-time to every stage of incident response, empowering SOC, SecOps, and IR teams to:

• Prepare for a breach with live attack surface modeling.
• Detect malicious behavior based on real-time posture.
• Investigate threats automatically using impact-driven analysis.
• Respond with surgical precision, reducing MTTR to under 5 minutes.

Ready to see what cloud context can do for your team?

Meet with our CDR experts to see how cloud context transforms security from reactive triage into confident, real-time response.

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