The Detective Treadmill

Edition #13: The Detective Treadmill

Your security team closed 50 findings last week. Your CSPM tool generated 100 new ones this week. The backlog grows.

Same violation types keep appearing - public S3 buckets, unencrypted EBS volumes, overly permissive security groups. Different resource IDs, same problems.

This is The Detective Treadmill - running faster just to stay in place.

Detection-heavy governance creates an endless remediation cycle. Every misconfiguration generates a finding that requires triage, ticket creation, assignment, remediation, and verification. By the time you close Monday's findings, Thursday's scan has generated more.

The root issue is an unbalanced control strategy. Breaking free requires balancing your control spectrum using the Controls Practice from the 5 Practices of Cloud Governance:

→ Identify high-frequency findings - Which violations appear repeatedly? These are prevention candidates.
→ Implement organization-level preventive policies - Service Control Policies, Azure Policy, and GCP Organization Policies block risky actions before resources are created.
→ Enable secure defaults - Account-level settings like S3 Block Public Access prevent entire classes of misconfigurations invisibly.
→ Shift validation into build processes - IaC scanning catches violations during pull requests, not days later in production.
→ Reserve detection for what you can't prevent - Keep runtime detective controls as a safety net for defense in depth.

A balanced control strategy reduces remediation toil, eliminates repeat issues, and frees security capacity for strategic work. The treadmill slows, then stops - your team moves from running in place to moving forward.

- Keep on Herding, Bob

What's Happening in Cloud Governance 📡

Prevention-First Cloud Security 101: Prevention-first cloud security shifts organizations from reactive detection to proactive control by stopping misconfigurations and policy violations before they reach production. This governance approach uses four layered prevention mechanisms to enforce organization policies and maintain consistent security posture at scale.

AWS Cloud Financial Management: Key re:Invent 2025 Launches: AWS announced key FinOps launches at re:Invent 2025 to help organizations optimize cloud financial management and transform their cost governance practices. These tools enable better visibility, accountability, and control over cloud spending across enterprise environments.

Cloud Governance and Compliance: Policies and Frameworks: Cloud governance establishes structure and accountability by defining policies, standards, and processes that ensure resources are used securely and efficiently. Organizations need GRC frameworks with automation tools like AWS Config and Azure Policy to detect violations and enforce policies at scale.

Governance Isn't a Dirty Word: Policy in Dev Flow: This podcast explores integrating cloud governance into CI/CD pipelines to catch compliance and security issues early. Successful governance requires both technical solutions and cultural shifts toward shared responsibility across engineering teams.

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