Last Updated on March 14, 2025

What is Cloud Detection and Response and How Can It Help My Business?

Cloud detection and response (CDR) is one of the hottest buzzwords in cybersecurity these days. It describes one of the most promising emerging technologies to thwart cyber attacks targeting cloud environments. But with so many acronyms flying around this space, it can be hard to differentiate what tool does what. 

This article clears up the confusion and explains what CDR is, its primary use cases, and its connection to other cloud security solutions.

What is CDR?

CDR is a suite of connected capabilities that proactively protects cloud data and infrastructure from live cyber attacks. It continuously monitors a company’s cloud estate to automatically detect and alert on potential threats in real-time, assess their risk level, and optionally launch a predetermined response to address the threat. 

Sometimes called cloud native detection and response (CNDR) or cloud threat detection and response (CTDR), these tools can provide exceptional real-time visibility into cloud-based logs, network traffic, and user activity. CDR may use agentless technology to monitor cloud assets and detect attacks, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues.

Among CDR’s key capabilities are:

• A cloud-native focus.
  Unlike more established security tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR), many CDR tools are built from the ground up to handle the unique challenges of protecting cloud deployments.

• • Incident detection and analysis.
    CDR provides the services for team members to analyze the alerts it detects so they can initiate incident response protocols, including programmed responses.

• Automated response capabilities.
  CDR solutions give teams the option to automatically take steps to minimize threat impacts, such as blocking malicious IP addresses or quarantining compromised assets.
• Continuous monitoring across cloud sources.
  CDR continuously monitors and analyzes data from diverse sources to flag suspicious findings in real-time and help meet cybersecurity compliance/audit requirements.
• AI-assisted analytics.
  CDR vendors increasingly leverage AI and machine learning to enhance threat intelligence capabilities and spot complex patterns that point to possible attacks. 

Built to handle the complexity of multi-cloud, CDR can offer threat detection and response capabilities across all cloud workload types, including Kubernetes clusters and other containers, virtual machines (VMs), serverless applications, cloud networks, storage nodes, cloud services, APIs, and more.  

How does CDR relate to XDR?

CDR is conceptually similar and may even share some features with the latest extended detection and response (XDR) solutions. But CDR is much more focused on protecting the cloud versus endpoints and other on-premises assets. Similar to how XDR helps detect threats across on-premises environments by offering deep visibility into many different IT systems, networks, APIs, identity services, etc., CDR offers deep visibility into cloud deployments and assets.

Some XDR vendors state that their tools can also cover the cloud. But extended XDR capabilities originally developed for on-premises environments are not “cloud-native” and cannot offer the same level of visibility, granularity, and analysis across the whole cloud stack as is possible with “born on the cloud” CDR—especially across cloud-specific scenarios like serverless and containerized workloads. 

Overall, CDR and XDR have complementary roles within their respective cloud and on-premises areas. Used together, they help detect a comprehensive range of threats and offer more complete protection across a company’s IT environment. 

How does CDR relate to CNAPP?

According to Arick Goomanovsky, Vice President of Product Innovation at Tenable Security, many cloud security vendors are converging their offerings toward a platform approach or a “single pane of glass.” These platforms may include solutions for cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), and others in addition to CDR. 

As Arick notes, the evolving convergence between CDR and cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) offerings perhaps best illustrates this trend.

The two tools effectively look at the same problem (problematic activity or vulnerabilities in the cloud) from two different perspectives. CNAPP covers “pre-breach” user needs while CDR covers “post-breach” user needs—so their integration adds tremendous value.

In Tenable’s current solution suite, CDR is built alongside the CNAPP offering. But Arick calls these pricing and licensing particulars “a moving target” based on customer requirements. 

Arick explains: “You could say, ‘I’m looking at the same APIs, I’m doing very similar analysis… Why don’t I build a CDR as part of a CNAPP solution?’ But in our business, it’s not only about the technology but also the organization and the people. And historically, CDR or detection solutions generally have a different user.”

The primary users of CNAPP solutions are typically within the cloud engineering or cloud security organizations. Whereas people using CDR and other detection technologies like XDR or security information and event management (SIEM) are usually part of the security operations center (SOC) team. Besides representing different use cases and skill sets, these costs usually come out of different budgets.

But the synergy around CDR and CNAPP integration is especially powerful. For example, if you’re a detection specialist or a SOC operator, and you get an anomalous behavior alert from an endpoint, an API call or any other source, you want to quickly investigate the alert by looking at asset configurations. 

Many SIEM tools alert users to a wide range of suspicious behavior, but checking configurations requires using a different tool, which can slow down the analysis and response. This is why a robust CDR solution benefits from CNAPP integration—because time is of the essence when you’re trying to understand whether a security event is a security incident. 

How can CDR benefit my business?

Due to the size, complexity, dynamic nature, visibility issues, and management challenges of distributed multi-cloud environments, organizations may be unaware of numerous critical vulnerabilities in their cloud estate that could lead to a breach. Solving these problems is beyond the scope of traditional detection/response offerings, leading to gaps in coverage and more false alerts.

CDR can help companies take cloud security to the next level by:

• Reducing cloud-based cybersecurity risks and identifying vulnerabilities.
• Accelerating threat detection and remediation.
• Preventing breaches in the cloud environment or significantly reducing their impacts.
• Improving visibility into cloud infrastructure and workloads to support management and governance as well as security.
• Holistically covering the cloud attack surface for an improved overall cybersecurity posture and peace of mind for customers, investors, and other stakeholders.
• Potentially cutting costs by eliminating the need to license and manage redundant tools.

What’s next?

For more guidance on this topic, listen to Episode 148 of The Virtual CISO Podcast with guest Arick Goomanovsky, Vice President of Product Innovation at Tenable Security.