This is the Trace Id: 1d1768605942acb67dd473abae128b12
Skip to main content
Microsoft Security

What is cloud detection and response (CDR)?

Learn how cloud detection and response (CDR) helps identify and stop cyberthreats in multicloud environments.
Cloud detection and response (CDR) is a cloud-native security solution designed for today’s complex environments. It doesn’t just look at one piece of the puzzle—it provides oversight and correlates signals across all cloud layers, including workloads, identities, and services. For example, it can connect unusual sign-in behavior with suspicious activity in a workload and a misconfigured service—all in near real time. This helps security teams detect cloud threats that would otherwise slip through the cracks. And because CDR continuously monitors cyberthreat behaviors and patterns as they emerge, it empowers companies to move from a reactive approach to intelligent, proactive cloud defense.
  • Cloud-native security is essential because traditional tools can’t keep pace with dynamic, multicloud environments.
  • CDR detects cloud threats other approaches miss by monitoring containers, APIs, serverless workloads, and identity activity.
  • AI-assisted detection and automation allow for faster, more accurate cyberthreat response at cloud scale.
  • CDR works best when integrated with security information and event management (SIEM); security, orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and extended detection and response (XDR) tools, for unified visibility and response.
  • Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Defender XDR work together to deliver end-to-end CDR.
A hand holding a yellow shield with a cloud design, accompanied by text about cloud detection and response.

CDR correlates signals across cloud workloads, identities, and services to detect and respond to cyberthreats in near real time.

Why CDR matters in modern cloud security

The rapid shift from on-premises to cloud-first architectures has created or compounded several common security blind spots
 
  • Teams mistake posture management for active cyberthreat detection. Many organizations feel protected because they’re finding and fixing configuration issues and other vulnerabilities, however if they aren’t spending enough time detecting and responding to live in-progress cyberthreats, they may still be at risk.
  • ⁠Ephemeral compute infrastructure is hard to secure. In seconds, organizations can spin up and take down cloud infrastructure, such as containers, serverless functions, and APIs, resulting in an ever-changing, fragmented environment. This complicates cyberthreat detection and response.
  • ⁠Security operations centers (SOCs) lack effective tools. As cloud becomes “just another part” of infrastructure, SOC teams are being tasked with cloud threat detection but without the necessary cloud-native tools or context.
  • Multicloud and hybrid environments are increasing. Many organizations run workloads across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises systems. This has introduced visibility gaps and inconsistent security controls that make it easier for cloud threats to move laterally across environments.
  • Bad actors are deploying automated tools and AI-powered attacks. Using AI, cyberthreat actors can scan the internet or cloud infrastructure for misconfigurations or exposed services, exploit those weaknesses, hide their tracks, and evade detection.
CDR closes security gaps by delivering continuous monitoring, telemetry collection, and cyberthreat detection that’s purpose-built for the cloud. An evolution of cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs), it oversees all layers of the cloud, including workloads, identities, and services. It detects cyberattackers in motion and brings cloud-native context into the SOC to facilitate cross-environment cyberthreat hunting and response. Whether you're running workloads across Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform, CDR helps detect suspicious behavior earlier and respond faster—before attackers gain a foothold.
Slide showing security blind spots with a list of five risks and an illustration of cloud security under a magnifying glass.

CDR addresses blind spots in traditional security by delivering continuous monitoring, telemetry collection, and cyberthreat detection that’s purpose-built for the cloud.

How cloud detection and response works

CDR solutions are designed to monitor activity across your multicloud environment in real time. They use AI-assisted threat detection, behavioral analytics, and telemetry from cloud-native resources to reveal risks that traditional tools might miss.

Here are the steps a CDR solution takes to helps organizations identify and mitigate cloud threats:

Ingest cloud telemetry

CDR tools collect logs, events, and metadata from cloud services such as compute instances, storage, identities, APIs, and workloads. Sources include AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Logging, and Kubernetes audit logs.

Analyze behavior in real time

Using a combination of rule-based logic, machine learning, behavioral analytics, and threat intelligence, CDR analyzes this telemetry to detect anomalies, policy violations, and indicators of compromise (IOCs), flagging suspicious behavior such as:
 
  • Unusual access patterns.
  • ⁠Sudden privilege escalation.
  • ⁠Data exfiltration attempts.
  • ⁠Lateral movement across services.
Correlate across environments

CDR platforms unify signals from across multicloud and hybrid environments. This correlation helps build context and tell the complete cyberattack story, leading to more accurate detections and faster investigations.

Alert and prioritize

Detections are designated as prioritized alerts, often enriched with context—such as affected users, assets, severity, and suggested next steps—to reduce noise and speed up triage.

Automate response actions

To stop cyberattacks quickly, CDR solutions can automatically:
 
  • Isolate a compromised VM or container.
  • ⁠Revoke access credentials.
  • ⁠Block malicious IPs.
  • ⁠Roll back changes in infrastructure-as-code deployments.
Feed into broader security operations

CDR integrates with XDR, SIEM, and SOAR systems to correlate alerts across entities, provide a complete picture of the cyberthreat landscape, and support coordinated response across cloud and on-premises assets.
CDR benefits

Benefits of cloud detection and response

By combining near real-time visibility with AI security, CDR solutions make it easier to manage risk in fast-moving cloud environments. Here are a few ways CDR helps security teams stay ahead of cloud threats without slowing down innovation:

Unified visibility across environments

CDR provides comprehensive, near real-time visibility into cloud workloads, identities, APIs, and services. Unlike traditional security tools that operate in silos, CDR correlates signals across multicloud and hybrid environments, breaking down barriers and empowering security teams to see cyberthreats as they move across platforms. This unified view helps organizations spot cyberattacks, misconfigurations, and suspicious behavior that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Faster and more effective response

CDR allows for faster detection, investigation, and remediation of cloud threats. By continuously monitoring activity and correlating behavioral analytics and threat intelligence, CDR reduces the time it takes to respond to incidents. And automated playbooks and contextual remediation help security teams contain cyberthreats before they escalate, reducing operational overhead and exposure to a breach.

Strong protection against advanced and lateral cyberthreats

CDR is designed to address the unique risks of cloud environments, such as lateral movement, identity misuse, and multistage attacks. By correlating signals across workloads, identities, and cloud services, CDR detects sophisticated cyberthreats that traditional endpoint or network tools often miss. This leads to reduced alert fatigue, improved risk prioritization, and more robust defense against cyberattacks targeting cloud-native infrastructure.
A diagram comparing EDR, CWP, and CDR with descriptive text outlining their roles, approaches, threat detection, security visibility, and ideal applications.

Unlike endpoint detection and response (EDR) and CWP, CDR provides unified visibility, detection, and response across cloud workloads, endpoints, and services.

CDR best practices

A strong cloud threat detection and response strategy is about building a proactive, adaptive approach to cloud security that helps your team detect cyberthreats early, respond quickly, and reduce long-term risk.
Proactive defense measures:
 
  • Implement a Zero Trust model
    Always verify identity and access, regardless of network location. Treat every access request as potentially untrusted.

  • ⁠Enhance cloud security posture management (CSPM)
    Continuously evaluate and improve your cloud configurations to reduce risk from misconfigurations or policy drift. Limit public exposure of resources, remove unused services, and apply the principle of least privilege.

  • Strengthen data governance policies
    Classify sensitive data, monitor how it's accessed, and enforce controls to prevent accidental exposure or misuse.

  • ⁠Automate security practices
    Use policy enforcement, configuration checks, and remediation workflows to reduce manual errors.

  • Conduct regular security training
    Keep staff up to date on evolving cyberthreats, phishing tactics, and best practices for cloud hygiene.
     
Effective detection and response:

  • Implement continuous monitoring
    Monitor cloud services, user behavior, and workloads in real time to detect cyberthreats before they spread.

  • ⁠Apply AI-assisted analytics and incident response
    Use analytics to understand normal activity and flag anomalies that could indicate compromise. Enrich detections with up-to-date insights from known attack patterns and IOC. Reduce dwell time by triggering actions like access revocation or resource isolation as soon as cyberthreats are confirmed.

  • ⁠Integrate with your existing tools
    Connect CDR with SIEM, SOAR, and identity access management solutions to streamline response and expand visibility.

  • ⁠Run regular cyberthreat assessments and incident response drills
    Test your environment for vulnerabilities and assess how your detection tools are performing. Simulate real-world attack scenarios to strengthen coordination and readiness across your security team.

Use cases for cloud detection and response

Whether you're protecting customer data, internal systems, or critical infrastructure, CDR solutions are built to address common security use cases, including:
 
  • Credential misuse in software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps
    Detect unusual sign-ins or privilege escalations in collaboration tools or productivity apps.
     
  • Cloud data security
    Flag abnormal access patterns to sensitive files or detect mass downloads that signal data exfiltration.
     
  • Lateral movement across workloads
    Identify attempts to move between virtual machines or containers after initial access.
     
  • Cloud misconfigurations
    Alert when publicly exposed resources, overly permissive roles, or unencrypted storage buckets are detected.
     
  • Policy violations
    Expose violations of internal security controls or regulatory requirements across cloud services.
 

How to select and deploy a CDR solution

Selecting the right CDR solution starts with understanding your cloud architecture and security priorities. Look for tools that offer deep visibility into your cloud platforms and that integrate with your existing security stack, including SIEM, SOAR, and XDR solutions. Key capabilities to prioritize include behavioral analytics, AI-assisted detection, automation, and support for multicloud and hybrid environments. The goal is to choose a solution that aligns with your cyberthreat models and scales with your infrastructure.

Deployment should begin with high-risk workloads or critical accounts to validate coverage and tune detection policies. Use built-in baselining to understand normal activity, adjust thresholds to reduce false positives, and align response actions with your cloud governance strategy. As coverage expands, automate incident response where appropriate and ensure security teams are trained to interpret alerts and act quickly. A well-deployed CDR solution strengthens cloud resilience without adding operational friction.

Emerging trends in CDR

The future of CDR is moving toward deeper intelligence, broader integration, and greater automation. As cloud environments grow more complex and attackers use more sophisticated AI to evade detection, CDR will increasingly rely on advanced behavioral analytics, large-scale cloud telemetry, and continuous learning to detect subtle and fast-moving cyberthreats. Expect more proactive capabilities—such as predictive cyberthreat modeling and real-time risk scoring—that help teams detect cyberattacks earlier.

CDR will also become more tightly integrated with XDR, identity protection, and cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools, forming a unified defense layer across infrastructure, applications, and users. Automation will play a larger role, not just in response, but in prevention—through policy enforcement, anomaly suppression, and self-healing configurations. Ultimately, CDR will evolve from a reactive tool to a critical part of adaptive cloud security, helping organizations manage risk at cloud speed and scale.

Microsoft solutions for cloud detection and response

Microsoft delivers CDR capabilities through Defender for Cloud and Defender XDR, which work together to offer:
 
  • Cloud-native threat detection. Provide a robust layer of security by detecting cloud threats across the Kubernetes stack.
  • In-depth investigation. Trace the root cause of an incident across clouds and uncover potential attack methods with cyberthreat analytics designed for container incidents.
  • Accelerated response. Minimize the impact of an incident by isolating compromised pods to cut off unauthorized access. Automatically remediate cyberattacks with AI.
Together, these capabilities provide a comprehensive approach to securing containerized environments and reducing runtime threats.
RESOURCES

Learn more about Microsoft Security

A person's hand touching a screen.
Solution

Protect multicloud workloads

Discover vulnerabilities, uncover cyberthreats, and accelerate investigations across workloads.
A man and woman looking at a computer.
Security 101

What is cloud security?

Explore how to protect applications and infrastructure in hybrid and multicloud environments.

Frequently asked questions

  • Cloud detection and response (CDR) is a proactive security approach that provides oversight across all cloud layers, including workloads, identities, and services. It correlates signals across these layers to detect and mitigate cyberthreats that would otherwise slip through the cracks.
  • Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is a host-based, agent-driven solution that detects and responds to cyberthreats on laptops, servers, and mobile endpoints. It’s focused on identifying ransomware, malware, unauthorized access, and persistence techniques at the device and operating system level. Cloud detection and response (CDR), by contrast, provides holistic visibility across multicloud environments. It correlates signals across workloads, clouds, endpoints, and other environments to track cyberattack paths, identify patterns, and deliver contextual understanding. With CDR, you get fast, accurate cyberthreat detection and mitigation at scale.
  • Network detection and response (NDR) analyzes network traffic to detect cyberthreats moving across or into internal systems. Cloud detection and response (CDR) focuses on activity within cloud platforms, including identity usage, API calls, storage access, and workload behavior.
  • Cloud detection and response (CDR) cloud security comprises tools that monitor, detect, and respond to cyberthreats across cloud environments. They enhance cloud security by providing continuous visibility, advanced threat analytics, and automated response actions tailored to cloud-native workloads.
  • Cloud detection and response (CDR) works by continuously collecting telemetry from cloud resources, applying AI-assisted cyberthreat detection and behavioral analytics, and triggering response actions based on severity. It integrates with broader security tools to enrich context and coordinate faster remediation with the goal of detecting cyberthreats early and containing them before they can cause harm.

Follow Microsoft Security