Today’s developers move at increasingly rapid speed – making it more critical than ever to identify and resolve code vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle. By tackling security early – instead of waiting until testing and deployment – engineering teams can reduce unnecessary patching and maintenance cycles, reduce risks, and ensure timely delivery of new features.

Whether for managing remote teams, supporting ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) policies, or simply another layer in a data protection strategy, services like Microsoft Intune offer greater control over the devices on your network. But using the data from these services often requires tedious prep work, and this process is likely repeated multiple times a week, if not daily. Tedious, repetitive, structured: these are all signs that a process can and should be automated.

The consensus on the state of cybersecurity professionals tends to fall somewhere between “burdened by high volumes of responsibility” and “dangerously understaffed and suffering from unhealthy levels of stress,” depending on how optimistic your source is.

Toil — endless, exhausting work that yields little value in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — is the scourge of security engineers everywhere. You end up with mountains of toil if you rely on manual effort to maintain cloud security. Your engineers spend a lot of time doing mundane jobs that don’t actually move the needle. Toil is detrimental to team morale because most technicians will become bored if they spend their days repeatedly solving the same problems.

Proactively finding and eliminating advanced threats through threat hunting is a growing necessity for many organizations, yet few have enough resources or skilled employees to do it effectively. For those who do have an active threat hunting program, the process is often manual and time consuming. With cloud security automation, however, you can implement rules that automatically adjust your security policies based on the latest threat data.

If you help to manage cloud environments, you’re probably familiar with the concept of identity lifecycle management. Identity lifecycle management helps you keep track of who is allowed to do what within your cloud. But merely understanding identity lifecycle management isn’t enough to administer modern cloud identities effectively. You also need a way to automate identity lifecycle management at massive scale.

You’ve secured your cloud identities. You’ve hardened your cloud security posture. You’ve configured strong cloud access controls. But there’s still one more thing you need in order to secure your cloud environment: a cloud workload protection platform, or CWPP. Cloud workload protection platforms secure the workloads that run on your cloud — which are distinct from the infrastructure, user identities and configurations that form the foundation of your cloud environment.