It's 1:45 AM—do you know where your gaps are?
You're a Security Leader—your mission: secure the business without slowing it down.
Tonight, reports from your cloud teams come in: a workload behaving oddly, traffic between regions increased slightly, costs are a few percent over budget. You won't hear impact indicators in real time. If you're lucky, you'll see a spike in east-west traffic before a breach materializes.
The simple truth: 79% of all breaches involve east-west movement. Those detours through internal cloud networks are where attackers hide, moving laterally across workloads, bewildering controls, and staying hidden—often for months.
So here's your question: If it's 1:45 AM, can you see all your east-west traffic? And do you know where your gaps are?
Blind Spots Threaten Everything
Cloud tools today are excellent at north-south control—ingress firewalling, perimeter WAFs, API gateways. But once traffic travels between workloads—within regions, zones, containers—visibility vanishes.
Current industry data paints a chilling picture:
75% of CISOs say east-west visibility matters more than north-south, yet only 40% actually have it.
A staggering 65% of orgs experienced cloud security incidents just in 2024.
And only 17% report full visibility into lateral movement.
Our own research confirms this crisis: According to Aviatrix's 2025 State of Cloud Network Security report, 51% of U.S. organizations identify network traffic visibility as the security capability that needs the most improvement.
Despite this acknowledged gap:
Only 20% leverage third-party threat intelligence feeds for real-time monitoring
A concerning 76% rely on basic native cloud provider tools with limited telemetry
While 56% use third-party observability platforms, the reliance on multiple disparate tools creates fragmentation and operational overhead
Lack of visibility means adversaries can land and pivot across containers, VMs, and microservices—stirring trouble for weeks or months.
Why the Gaps Exist
Point tools, no context CSP firewalls, third-party appliances, WAFs, IDS/IPS—all invented for specific domains. They're stitched together, not integrated. The result: inconsistent policy and blind spots across environments. The Aviatrix report underscores this: organizations juggling multiple tools lack an integrated, multicloud-aware observability layer—limiting both responsiveness and scalability.
Encrypted traffic stuck CISOs worry about visibility into encrypted flows, but few have it. 83% say it's a priority, yet 76% still assume encryption = security.
Tool sprawl equals latency 71% of orgs use 10+ security tools, creating alert fatigue and slow reactions. The Aviatrix study confirms this fragmentation problem—the absence of unified observability creates dangerous operational gaps.
DevOps speed vs. Security: Teams spin up Kubernetes clusters and AI pipelines overnight—but permissions, microsegments, and policy control lag behind.
The Reality Check: Overconfidence Meets Underperformance
Here's the most troubling finding from the Aviatrix report: 95% of organizations express confidence in their ability to detect and respond to cloud workload threats. Yet the same organizations acknowledge that network traffic visibility, the foundation of threat detection, is their biggest capability gap.
This dangerous disconnect suggests organizations are operating with false confidence while significant blind spots persist in their cloud infrastructure.
You can't secure what you can't see, and relying on basic cloud provider telemetry is like trying to guard a fortress while blindfolded.
The Consequences: Lateral Breaches
What happens in those quiet canals of cloud:
Equifax: attackers moved laterally from a webserver breach across internal networks for months.
IBM incident response stats: misconfigurations contribute to 23% of cloud compromises, with human error appearing in 80% of breaches.
Check Point's 2025 report: only 9% detected incidents in 60 minutes, with 62% remediating after 24+ hours—and only 17% had full lateral visibility.
These aren't statistics. They're case studies in organizational risk. Because when attackers move east-west, they escalate privileges, access sensitive data, and persist—undetected until it's too late.
East-West Traffic Is Not a Small Matter
The shift to microservices, Kubernetes, and serverless architectures amplifies east-west traffic. In hybrid and multicloud settings, traffic crosses unknown territory—CSP zones, on-prem infrastructure, hybrid networks, transit gateways.
Yet internal firewalling and segmentation remain insufficient. Only 37% enforce east-west policies (MTI Technology). And 80% insist it's a priority—yet execution lags dangerously (MTI Technology, Help Net Security).
The takeaway: east-west control is business critical, not optional.
The Solution: Cloud Native Security Fabric (CNSF)
Aviatrix's Cloud Native Security Fabric directly addresses the visibility crisis identified in our research. CNSF delivers what organizations desperately need:
Realtime Embedded Observability
Unlike the fragmented tools plaguing 76% of organizations, CNSF provides packet, flow, metadata, and encrypted traffic visibility—across clouds, regions, workloads, containers in a single integrated platform.
Zero Trust for Workloads
Identity-aware microsegmentation applied consistently to VMs, containers, and serverless functions.
East-West Policy Enforcement
Central policy plan that applies firewalls, routing, and segmentation everywhere uniformly, closing the gaps that only 20% of organizations currently monitor with threat intelligence.
Developer Velocity
Seamless integration into CI/CD, Kubernetes, and APIs: security with no friction.
Cost Transparency
Cloud-friendly billing models plus insight into firewall, transit, and observability usage.
Hybrid & Multicloud Native
Engineered for AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, on-prem—all unified under one fabric, eliminating the tool sprawl and fragmentation issues.
How CNSF Closes the Gaps
1. Unified Visibility
With CNSF, you visualize east-west flows in real time: no gaps, no blind spots. This directly solves the #1 problem identified by 51% of organizations: inadequate network traffic visibility.
2. Runtime Enforcement
Segments are enforced at each workload, region, protocol, and identity. No more waiting logs—you block threats as they emerge.
3. Encryption-Aware Traffic Telemetry
CNSF taps into encrypted streams, breaking the false perception that encryption equals safety—a gap 76% of orgs trust, but shouldn't (Help Net Security).
4. AI-Ready, Without Risk
A single pane secures AI pipelines—high-bandwidth, encrypted channels to data lakes, model endpoints—without slowing training cycles.
5. Policy-as-Code
CNSF integrates with DevOps pipelines and GitOps workflows—policy changes are code-reviewed, tested, and deployed just like application changes.
6. Operational Simplicity
One console governs firewalls, segmentation, transit, and observability. You eliminate the tool fragmentation that forces organizations to juggle native cloud tools, third-party platforms, and threat intelligence feeds separately.
Real-World Alignment with Data
65%. CNSF reduces that by stopping lateral movement early.
Only . CNSF gives 100% visibility.
Misconfigurations cause . CNSF removes that tail risk with consistent central policy.
96% of CISOs prioritize visibility—just 40% have it.
91%. CNSF enables neither speed nor protection need take a hit.
51% CNSF provides the real-time embedded observability they desperately need.
Mind the Gap. Fix the Gap.
From the board's perspective: your job is to enable business velocity, support innovation, and safeguard data integrity—all while keeping costs predictable and threats contained.
With CNSF, your pitch evolves: "We see east-west traffic in full. We segment and encrypt at workload level. Since deploying CNSF, lateral movement risk dropped to near zero. And we did all this without slowing CI/CD or hindering developers."
You're no longer chasing alerts and postmortems. You're closing the gap between intent and execution on your terms.
If It's 1:45 AM...
When alerts come in, you won't scramble to corral traffic. You'll already have visibility into the blast radius. You'll know which workloads are talking to each other—and who's allowed. You'll isolate malicious patterns fast—before they bloom into exfiltration, ransomware, or compliance nightmares.
That's CNSF's promise: cloud-native security that's always on, low-latency, frictionless—exactly what CISOs need.
Wrap-Up: Secure the Business. Don't Slow It Down.
79% of breaches involve east-west movement (Help Net Security, Stock Titan, Digitalisation World).
The majority of orgs still lack east-west visibility and policy.
51% of organizations identify network traffic visibility as their biggest security capability gap (Aviatrix report).
Only 20% use threat intelligence feeds while 76% rely on basic cloud provider tools.
Misconfigurations and inadequate tooling enable breaches lasting months.
Aviatrix CNSF fixes that with zero trust, cloud-native security that:
Delivers full east-west observability
Enforces identity-based microsegmentation
Secures encrypted traffic
Integrates seamlessly with DevSecOps
Preserves developer velocity
Eliminates tool sprawl
Enables cost transparency
That's what it means to mind the gap at 1:45 AM—and to know exactly where you stand.
Ready to close your east-west visibility gap without slowing down?
Schedule a demo to see Aviatrix CNSF in action.
Register for a webinar on July 31 where Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt and ESG Principal Analyst John Grady will explain the value of CNSF.
References
Aria Cybersecurity, “What Do the Worst Breaches in History All Have in Common?,” December 5, 2019, https://blog.ariacybersecurity.com/blog/what-do-the-worst-breaches-in-history-all-have-in-common.
Aviatrix, “State of Cloud Network Security: 2025,” June 2025, https://pages.aviatrix.com/report-industry-survey-2025.html.
Check Point, “State of Cyber Security 2025,” accessed July 24, 2025, https://www.checkpoint.com/resources/items/report--cyber-security-report-2025-bf02?fw=18b74.
Digitalisation World, “Almost one third of breaches go undetected,” 2023, https://m.digitalisationworld.com/news/65782/almost-one-third-of-breaches-go-undetected.
Gigamon, “2025 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey,” accessed July 24, 2025, https://www.gigamon.com/campaigns/hybrid-cloud-security-survey.html.
Help Net Security, “1 out of 3 breaches go undetected,” June 24, 2025, https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2024/06/24/detecting-breaches-struggle-in-organizations/.
MTI, “Common Challenges with Securing East and West Traffic,” accessed July 24, 2025, https://mti.com/common-challenges-with-securing-east-and-west-traffic/.
Stock Titan, “Dangerous Blind Spots Costing Enterprises Time, Trust, and Agility Exposed in Check Point’s 2025 Cloud Security Report,” accessed July 24, 2025, https://www.stocktitan.net/news/CHKP/dangerous-blind-spots-costing-enterprises-time-trust-and-agility-hhhqnclp1yr1.html.
Tahawul Tech, “91% of Security Leaders Admit to Cloud Security Trade-Offs,” May 26, 2025, https://www.tahawultech.com/insight/91-of-security-leaders-admit-to-cloud-security-trade-offs/.
UncommonX, “East-West Exposure: The Hidden Risk in Unseen Internal Traffic,” February 21, 2025, https://info.uncommonx.com/blog/east-west-exposure-the-hidden-risk-in-unseen-internal-traffic.
Verizon, “2025 Data Breach Investigations Report,” accessed July 24, 2025, https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/.
Viking Cloud, “192 Cybersecurity Stats and Facts for 2025,” July 15, 2025, https://www.vikingcloud.com/blog/cybersecurity-statistics.
