Infrastructure vs. Runtime — Where Are Your Priorities?

This commentary reflects lessons from Black Hat and startup advisory work, examining how cloud adoption reshapes security priorities and the tension between CSPM-led infrastructure hardening and runtime security. It highlights market overlap and confusion across CNAPP/CSPM offerings, the need for deep runtime context (e.g., least-privilege, eBPF, managed service traffic analysis), the credibility gap versus native tools like AWS GuardDuty, Azure Sentinel, and GCP Security Command Center, and the absence of data-normalization standards. The piece advises enterprises to balance secure cloud configurations and compliance with robust, business-aware runtime defenses tailored to organizational needs.