The Future of Cloud Security: A New Act for Cyber Risk Operations
Qualys, the leader in Cyber Risk Operations, is proud to be recognized in Latio Tech’s 2025 Cloud Security Market Report as a leader in both CTEM and the Cloud Security Ecosystem. This acknowledgement by Latio Tech reinforces the strength of our strategy—anchored by the industry’s first Risk Operations Center (ROC), which defines the future of cloud security.
The cloud security landscape has reached a complex state of maturity. Organizations have transitioned from simply adopting cloud infrastructure to attempting to optimize vast, sprawling environments. As the 2025 Latio Cloud Security Report highlights, “Teams are focusing on reducing exploitable vulnerabilities” and “Operationalizing large scale patching programs remains a priority.” However, this ordinary world is far from simple.
Security leaders find themselves navigating a sea of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, armed with an average of three or more disparate tools for their cloud security programs. The situation is compounded by economic pressure; over 65% of CISOs surveyed by Latio expect their cloud security budgets to either stagnate or decrease in the coming year. They are tasked with delivering superior results with fewer resources, a classic CISO dilemma.
The goal is clear: reduce risk, but the path is obscured by tool complexity and budgetary constraints.
The Escalation of Challenges and Consequences
The pursuit of a unified security solution has paradoxically created more complexity. The definition of a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) has expanded year after year, with platforms growing into unwieldy behemoths attempting to cover code, cloud, runtime, SaaS, and now AI security. This is the critical challenge: the very tools meant to bring clarity are instead generating an overwhelming volume of findings and operational paralysis.
The disconnect between application security and cloud security teams persists, even as their data becomes more intertwined. As Latio notes, “most organizations are both dissatisfied with the offering, and don’t prefer having it a part of the solution.” The risk is not just a backlog of alerts; it’s the creation of critical blind spots, the failure to identify true attack paths, and the inability to respond effectively to threats that traverse the full application lifecycle, from code to cloud.
The push to adopt a single “best tool” often forces teams into lowest-common-denominator platforms that overlook deeper, domain-specific capabilities. Customers may use a mix of CNAPP, ASPM, identity, and workload tools—because each solves a different part of the exposure problem. What ultimately matters isn’t locking everything into one vendor, but unifying, correlating, and prioritizing exposures across these sources so teams can focus on the risks that truly matter.
The Logical Solution: A New Mandate for Risk Operations
The Latio report illuminates a path forward, recommending a strategic shift. “The future of cloud security tooling is moving beyond CNAPP as an ‘everything security’ platform. Instead, teams are focusing on application security testing, universal vulnerability management, and advanced workload protection as individual focus areas, each mapped to specific practitioners.” This is the foundation of a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) program, and it aligns directly with the philosophy Qualys has pioneered for years.
For Qualys, CTEM is not a pivot; it is the evolution of our core mission: unified vulnerability management, prioritization, and remediation, all powered by our TruRisk engine. We recognized that to move beyond the noise, enterprises required a new operational model. This vision is realized through our Enterprise TruRisk Management (ETM) platform, empowering organizations to establish their own Risk Operations Center (ROC).
Powered by ETM, a ROC goes beyond the typical CTEM framework and provides the holistic solution needed to navigate the complexities outlined by Latio. It unifies cyber risk signals from a wide array of first-party and third-party sources, including Qualys TotalCloud for CNAPP and Qualys TotalAppSec for comprehensive application security, and correlates them into measurable risk insights. This directly addresses the market’s dissatisfaction with bundled, inadequate CNAPP and AST solutions by providing best-in-class, integrated capabilities.
Qualys TotalCloud delivers a remediation-ready CNAPP that goes beyond basic posture management. It provides:
- Attack Path Analysis: Expands exposure analysis to include blast radius, identity, and real-time runtime insights, moving beyond simple vulnerability lists.
- Continuous Workload Protection: Utilizes our FlexScan approach to secure both long-lived and ephemeral resources across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, eliminating the blind spots of agentless-only methods.
- Cloud-Native Remediation: Employs QFlow to automate actions, replacing manual ticket queues with scalable, context-driven workflows.
Qualys TotalAppSec integrates seamlessly to provide the deep application context that is often missing. It combines DAST, SCA, and API scanning to offer full-stack visibility, connecting code-to-cloud traceability and enabling teams to operationalize response at scale.
This integrated data is funneled into the Qualys ETM platform, where it is transformed into a strategic asset for the ROC. The ROC doesn’t just aggregate alerts; it provides a unified, consistent view of risk across the entire hybrid attack surface. By adding business context, it empowers CISOs to articulate risk in business-aligned financial terms, enabling more strategic conversations with executives and the board.
Ultimately, the solution elevates the entire security conversation. It is no longer about agents versus agentless, or a debate over the scope of a CNAPP. The new mandate is about a business’s ability to understand, quantify, and reduce its cyber risk continuously and at scale. This is the future of cloud security, a future defined by the operational leverage of a Risk Operations Center. Qualys has not just anticipated this future; we have built the platform to deliver it today.
How Qualys Addresses Latio’s Security Report Findings
As Latio notes in their Market Report, CNAPP Generation 1 was “defined by agentless vulnerability scanning and misconfiguration discovery.” Qualys expanded this foundation years ago by pioneering a multidimensional, context-rich approach to risk with TruRisk, which correlates exposures, real-time threat intelligence, misconfigurations, exploit indicators, and asset value into a unified, business-aligned risk score.
This innovation gave enterprises a strategic advantage: the ability to focus on the vulnerabilities that mattered most and to reduce operational noise across every asset type—hosts, containers, OT/IoT devices, servers, and cloud services. Coupled with native attack surface management and the industry’s most flexible scanning options, Qualys has helped some of the world’s largest organizations uncover and eliminate blind spots that agentless-only CNAPPs routinely miss.
Our leadership became even clearer with the introduction of TruRisk Eliminate, which brought patching and remediation into the heart of risk operations, not as an afterthought, but as an integral step in the risk lifecycle. The impact is real: in the past year alone, Qualys customers deployed over 140 million patches, demonstrating that large-scale, operationalized remediation is not just possible, it’s essential.
As enterprises shifted to containerized and cloud-native architectures, the challenges of vulnerability management expanded dramatically. The way applications were built, deployed, and operated changed, and with it, the teams, processes, and attack surface. This evolution created new demands in what many describe as Phase 2 of CNAPP:
- Vulnerability Mapping: Development teams increasingly owned application components, requiring clearer mapping of vulnerabilities to code owners for faster remediation.
- Real-Time Detection: A surge in software supply chain, web application, API-driven, and zero-day attacks created the need for sophisticated, real-time detection beyond traditional scanners.
- Unified IAM: Cloud identity became a primary attack vector, driving the need to unify IAM context with vulnerability exposure.
- Flex Scanning: Organizations required flexible scanning approaches — not “agent vs. agentless,” but the ability to cover long-lived and ephemeral workloads without blind spots.
Amid this shift, Qualys extended the same heritage of TruRisk-driven prioritization and remediation to the cloud attack surface, but modernized it to meet the realities of cloud-native scale.
We infused our multidimensional risk model into every layer of the cloud stack via Qualys TotalCloud, enabling security teams to bring consistent, proactive risk reduction across containers, Kubernetes, serverless, APIs, data, identities, and cloud services.
Through this evolution, one principle remained unchanged: cloud security still begins and ends with prioritizing and eliminating the vulnerabilities that matter most, whether they originate in code, containers, APIs, identities, or runtime alerts.
Conclusion
In Latio’s analysis, “the future of cloud security [is] defined by hybrid cloud vulnerability management and advanced workload protection.” This aligns directly with the philosophy behind CTEM. For many vendors, CTEM represents a major pivot. For Qualys, it’s simply the evolution of what we’ve always done best: unified vulnerability management, prioritization, and remediation powered by TruRisk.
We recognized early that enterprises needed a way to correlate and prioritize findings across a dramatically expanded hybrid cloud attack surface spanning code, containers, data, identities, applications, and cloud infrastructure.
While the market is now racing to “unify exposures,” Qualys is already doing this across first-party, cloud-native, and third-party sources, giving customers a unified, consistent view of risk regardless of which tools they choose for AppSec, CNAPP, or scanning.
Finally, with agentic AI delivered through the Qualys Cyber Risk Marketplace, the ROC elevates CTEM even further by automating triage, investigation, reporting, and workflow orchestration. This gives CISOs real operational leverage: teams spend less time chasing alerts and more time reducing risk.
This evolution elevates the CTEM conversation. It’s no longer about agents, scanners, or point capabilities. It’s about how organizations can understand, quantify, and reduce cyber risk, continuously and at scale.
Get to know the Qualys Platform.