In the world of cloud native development, speed is everything. CI/CD pipelines hum with automation. Code moves from developer laptops to production in minutes. Security teams have spent the last decade pushing left embedding testing earlier into the development lifecycle to catch misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and insecure code before it ever ships.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your cloud security strategy stops at deployment, you’re not secure.
The idea that you’re ‘secure at release’ is a myth. And in today’s dynamic, distributed cloud environments, it’s a dangerous one.
The false comfort of ‘shift left and ship’
Shift left security has been a powerful movement, no doubt. Integrating static analysis, container scanning, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) checks into the development pipeline helped organisations catch issues early and reduce time to remediation. But in focusing so heavily on preproduction controls, many security strategies have become front loaded and ultimately incomplete.
Cloud environments are not static. Containers spin up and down in seconds. Serverless functions change behaviour based on input. Third party APIs evolve. New data flows emerge. And threat actors don’t limit themselves to the build phase.
What’s secure today at deployment may be wide open tomorrow.
This is where most organisations fall into a false sense of confidence. They assume once a release passes all CI/CD checks and policy gates, it’s safe. But cloud native infrastructure changes constantly. Code, configurations, and even identities behave differently in runtime than they do in test environments. That difference is where attackers thrive.
Runtime is the blind spot in DevSecOps
We don’t ship software once anymore, we deploy continuously. So why do many security teams still think about protection as a onetime gate?
The next evolution of DevSecOps isn’t just about integrating tools earlier, it’s about extending visibility later. Runtime risk visibility is essential in a cloud native world. It means understanding what’s actually running, how workloads are behaving, which identities are accessing what, and what’s changing in real time.
Without runtime insight, you’re flying blind. And in a world of ephemeral infrastructure and automated attacks, that’s not a risk most businesses can afford.
Runtime security closes the feedback loop. It turns static assumptions into dynamic observability. It catches misconfigurations that escaped IaC scanning, secrets that leak during execution, and lateral movement by compromised identities. It’s the only way to validate that what you think is happening matches what’s actually happening in production.
The business cost of ignoring post deployment threats
Missing runtime threats doesn’t just pose technical risk it has massive business consequences.
A leaked token in a dev container can become a production data breach. A privilege escalation in a cloud function can lead to customer data exposure. A single undetected misconfiguration can become a compliance failure with real financial penalties.
And beyond the technical implications, there’s the cost of lost trust, regulatory scrutiny, and brand damage. These are the incidents that make headlines, and they often originate after deployment.
Think about the high-profile breaches of the last few years. Many of them didn’t come from unscanned code. They came from runtime behaviour no one was watching. They came from runtime behaviour no one was watching. The kind of activity that slips through undetected when security ends at the pipeline.
Rethinking ownership means security can’t walk away after release
Another mindset that needs to change is the idea that security can “check the box” once code ships. In some organisations, AppSec owns everything preproduction while cloud or ops teams take over from there. That split might have made sense in the on-prem days, but it’s a liability in the cloud.
In modern environments, security is not a phase, it’s a continuous responsibility. Developers, platform engineers, and security teams all need shared visibility and accountability across the entire lifecycle.
Security teams must take ownership of runtime just as much as they do source code. That means partnering with DevOps to monitor real-time behaviour, define policies that adapt to dynamic environments, and respond quickly when things go sideways.
The new model isn’t handoff, rather, it’s hand in hand.
Security in the time of the cloud
The cloud has changed the rules. It’s faster, more dynamic, and more complex than the environments most security tools were built for. CI/CD, shift left, and “secure by design” principles remain important but they’re no longer enough on their own.
If you’re not securing what’s running, you’re not secure.
Real cloud native security doesn’t stop at the gate. It follows workloads into production. It learns, adapts, and protects continuously. And in today’s world, it’s the only kind of security that works.
So ask yourself: what’s running in your environment right now? And who’s watching it?
If the answer isn’t clear, it’s time to rethink your strategy.