By Kevin Hanes, CEO, Reveal Security
I’ve spent the past few months on the road talking with enterprise security leaders. A consistent theme has emerged: CISOs are re-architecting their security programs for a post-perimeter, cloud-first world. The shift is massive and it’s happening fast.
Just last week, I had a conversation with a CISO from a large health insurance organization that brought this into sharp focus. The IT environment supports tens of thousands of users – members, providers, and employees – and they’re going all-in on the cloud. That means the old playbooks are getting tossed. Their entire network detection stack is being sunset. The new security strategy is identity- and data-focused.
This isn’t a theoretical pivot. This CISO is actively rebuilding his stack from the ground up. And like many others I’ve spoken with, he’s hitting a critical gap: he can’t see what identities are doing inside his core cloud and SaaS applications. Apps like Microsoft 365, AWS, and Salesforce are central to how the business runs, but there’s no behavioral visibility inside them.
As he put it: “Behavior [monitoring] has to be part of this new stack.” He’s right. And it’s exactly the SaaS security problem I outlined in a recent blog post. The traditional security stack wasn’t designed for today’s app sprawl and identity complexity. We need a new strategy and stack – one that assumes attackers will get past authentication and focuses on what users (both human and non-human) do after they’re in the application environment.
This CISO had also been burned by the promise of UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics). Like many others, he bought in years ago, hoping machine learning could help surface risk based on anomalous behavior. But the reality fell short: too much noise, too little action. Now, in a cloud world, he’s looking for something “UEBA-like”, but this time, it has to actually work.
That’s exactly the gap Reveal Security is built to fill.
We talked about how Reveal delivers deep visibility into identity behavior across SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure. I walked him through how we detect suspicious activity before and after authentication, correlate actions across applications, and flag only what’s truly anomalous. Our goal isn’t to bury teams in alerts. In environments like his, we typically surface 10 to 20 high-fidelity findings per week. That got his attention.
This is what modern security looks like: identity-aware, behavior-driven, and cloud/app-focused. It’s not about retrofitting legacy tools or flooding the SOC with more alerts. It’s about giving lean security teams visibility and control so they can protect what matters without slowing the business down.
This was an energizing conversation – like many I’ve had in recent months – not because the challenges are new, but because the mindset is. The urgency is real. Leaders like this CISO are ready to move.
Reveal is here to help. We’re on a mission to solve the SaaS Security problem and deliver on the promise of behavior-based security.
Stay tuned – there’s a lot more coming.
– Kevin
