In Short:
Especially for Cyber Security Awareness Month, this guest blog by our partner Skyhawk Security highlights the urgent challenge SMBs face: limited resources against enterprise-grade cloud risk. It details Skyhawk Security's solution, which pairs an AI-driven Autonomous Purple Team with Real-Time Detection. The Purple Team uses a digital twin to map and prioritize weaponized attack paths on AWS, Azure, and GCP. This approach allows teams to fix the few exploitable risks first and then monitor the rest in real time, delivering enterprise-grade defense without extra headcount and ensuring emerging threats are stopped before they become breaches.
The SMB Cloud Security Challenge
Small and midsize businesses face enterprise-grade cloud risk with limited resources. Real-time detection keeps incidents from becoming breaches by surfacing suspicious activity as it happens and enabling swift response. Skyhawk provides real-time detection alongside an AI-driven Purple Team that simulates attacker paths and turns posture gaps into prioritized fixes, with Cloudride as the delivery partner for Israeli SMBs.
Introducing Skyhawk's Two-Part Solution
In cloud infrastructure, the attack surface grows with every new identity, permission, internet-exposed endpoint, CI/CD change, and software or infrastructure vulnerability across PaaS services. Most findings are not actionable, yet the few that matter are the combinations an attacker can use: an exposed service with an over-permissive role, a misconfiguration that enables initial access, privilege escalation, lateral movement, or direct impact, or a vulnerable component that offers a foothold into the control plane or sensitive data. SMB teams rarely have the time or tooling to confirm exploitability, map the blast radius, and separate signal from noise. The result is alert fatigue, slow action on real risks, and a reactive posture where minor oversights become major incidents.
Prioritizing Real Risks with the Purple Team
Cloud security starts with improving security posture: minimizing exposure by fixing misconfigurations, tightening permissions, reducing internet-reachable services, and addressing software or infrastructure vulnerabilities. The challenge is volume, since every new resource, permission, or change can add dozens of items to review. Attack surface analysis makes this manageable by mapping how exposures, vulnerabilities, and privileges connect into real attack paths so teams can focus on the few weaponized issues that threaten sensitive assets. Not everything can be fixed quickly, and some exposures are required by design, so to close the remaining gap you need real-time observability through threat detection that monitors live activity, correlates events, and alerts when risky paths are being utilized.
Real-Time Detection for Emerging Threats
Skyhawk brings posture, context, and live visibility into one flow. An AI-driven Purple Team runs on a digital twin model of your cloud environment, with no impact on production, validating initial access, privilege escalation, and lateral movement to map the potential blast radius to sensitive assets. This analysis highlights the weaponized security gaps to address first. In production, real-time detection observes control plane activity, identity usage, network exposure, and configuration changes across AWS, Azure, and GCP PaaS services, then correlates these signals into validated incidents with clear next steps. Real-time detection closes security gaps by surfacing emerging threats before they become breaches by driving timely response. Together they reduce false positives, clarify business impact, and direct a focused set of actions that collapse multiple attack paths.
Cloud security for SMBs is about focusing on what is exploitable, closing it quickly, and monitoring the rest in real time. By pairing a digital twin Purple Team that exposes weaponized paths with real-time detection that surfaces emerging threats before they become breaches, Skyhawk delivers enterprise-grade defense without extra headcount. To put this into practice, work with Cloudride to implement Skyhawk in your environment, operationalize threat exposure management to reduce business risk.
About the Author
Asaf Shahar is the Head of Product at Skyhawk Security, leading the charge to deliver enterprise-grade cloud defense to small and midsize businesses. On November 11th Asaf and Lior Atias, our DevSecOps at Cloudride, will be running a joint webinar about smarter cloud security. Save your spot today!
