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What is Code to Cloud?
Everyone is in the cloud, and the adoption of DevOps tools have enabled organizations to deploy cloud infrastructure and resources at a scale and speed not previously possible. To reduce risk in these complex and dynamic environments, security teams are increasingly adopting a Code to Cloud security approach to proactively prevent risks from reaching production, and for those that do, increase the speed at which they are remediated.
Code to Cloud is a security approach that integrates security at every stage of an application’s lifecycle. It can be grouped into two main categories:
- Securing code in the development phase to ensure problematic code is identified and addressed before being deployed to cloud production environments e.g. through code scanning.
- For those issues that do reach production, being able to trace those risks back to the specific lines of code that introduced them to ensure the root cause is identified, and remediation is precise and efficient.
Key Aspects of Code to Cloud Worth Mentioning
- Secure code development/ensuring secure coding practices
- Secure CI/CD Pipelines (SAST and DAST)
- Runtime protection (CWPP, CNAPP, CSPM)
- Vulnerability management / continuous monitoring
- Risk remediation and mitigation
Code to Cloud for Faster Remediation
Security teams are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of security findings coming from a number of different security platforms including vulnerability management, application security, and cloud security platforms, such as CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platform), CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), and CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform). These alerts frequently lack context, making it difficult to prioritize and efficiently remediate and mitigate risks, resulting in a growing backlog of cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
At the same time, threat actors are using advanced technologies like AI to identify weaknesses in an organization’s environment to exploit vulnerabilities at a faster pace than ever before. To reduce the impact and volume of successful exploitation attempts, Code to Cloud strategies enable security teams to expedite remediation and improve their vulnerability management program. These types of capabilities can be used to handle CVEs, zero day vulnerabilities, and oftentimes cloud misconfigurations.
Key Capabilities
Integration with Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Leveraging the power of DevOps tools to streamline the process of identifying how security issues were introduced improves both the speed and precision of remediation. By using the same tools that introduced the problem to fix it, security and DevOps teams can collaborate more effectively, reducing the manual effort required to remediate risks.
Understanding Cloud Security Policies
Correlating findings coming from cloud security platforms (e.g. CSPM) with existing organizational guardrails ensures that risks already mitigated by existing policies are excluded, reducing the likelihood of false positives. This approach saves valuable time and resources, while ensuring attention is focused on true critical and high priority issues.
Automation
Today, remediating a single cloud security risk often takes organizations more than 30 days. Automation plays a big role in reducing Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR) and addressing issues before attackers can exploit them. By automating manual tasks like risk validation and code review, security teams can quickly trace problems back to the exact lines of code that introduced them, pinpointing root causes with precision.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI and Agentic AI can uplevel security teams and handle more complex tasks that can’t be simply automated. A key application of AI is to generate replacement code to resolve issues. AI also enhances alert enrichment, prioritization, and grouping of findings, among other tasks, such as aligning risks to resolution paths, to improve overall efficiency in the remediation process.
Key Benefits
Greater Context for Risk Prioritization
To efficiently remediate risks, security teams require context: To not only understand which risks should be accepted and which risks should be prioritized and fixed now, but to also understand the best path to remediation. Critical questions that need to be answered during the remediation process include: Are the impacted assets managed or unmanaged? Which DevOps platform was used to deploy the problematic code? What specific lines of code caused the problem? How and where should I fix the problem? Understanding answers to these questions in minutes versus days is key.
Accelerated Remediation
Gaining visibility into what DevOps actually manages, where and how, drastically speeds up the process of tracing open issues back to their origins and enables security teams to provide ready-to-implement fixes to DevOps, increasing the speed at which problems can be resolved.
Increased Fix Precision & Prevent Risks from Resurfacing
Fixing problems directly in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables a more precise fix, addressing the root cause of the problem. Further, it is the best way to reduce the risk of the same risks resurfacing – which is a common challenge. In cloud environments, where changes are often made in the cloud console or implemented manually and then overridden by DevOps systems or existing cloud policies.
Meet DevOps Where They Are
Security and DevOps teams often work in silos, slowing down remediation. Integrating security into the same workflows and tools DevOps teams use eliminates the endless back and forth between teams to research and implement the right solution.
How ZEST Can Help
ZEST Security is redefining cloud risk remediation and mitigation using Agentic AI, DevOps tools, and Open Source technologies. The platform enables security teams to streamline cloud security prioritization, root cause identification, and risk resolution. The platform can be deployed in minutes, natively integrating with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), cloud security solutions (e.g., CNAPP), and the most popular DevOps systems including Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi and ARM. Interested in learning more? Contact our team.
We're excited to announce that ZEST Security has been recognized as a vendor in three Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar reports this year: Emerging Tech: The Future of Exposure Management is Preemptive, Global Attack Surface Grid, and Preemptive Cybersecurity.
As organizations face increasingly complex threat landscapes, the need for preemptive exposure management, dynamic attack surface reduction, and automated security assessment has never been more critical.
Understanding the Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar
Gartner's Emerging Tech Impact Radar helps organizations identify and evaluate emerging technologies that could significantly impact their business operations. These reports assess technologies based on their potential transformative impact and adoption timeline, providing IT and security leaders with crucial insights for strategic planning.
Being featured in three separate reports confirms that ZEST Security is positioned at the forefront of multiple emerging technologies that are fundamentally reshaping security operations, enabling organizations to move from reactive vulnerability management to proactive, automated risk prevention.
ZEST Security in Emerging Tech: The Future of Exposure Management is Preemptive
In June 2025, ZEST Security was recognized in Gartner's Emerging Tech: The Future of Exposure Management is Preemptive report, underscoring the industry's recognition of our approach to transforming how organizations manage security exposures.
The Problem with Reactive Exposure Management
Traditional exposure management creates a perpetual cycle of detection and remediation that leaves organizations constantly playing catch-up. Security teams face thousands of identified vulnerabilities with no clear prioritization, alert fatigue from tools lacking context, and resource constraints that prevent them from addressing an ever-growing backlog.
What is Preemptive Exposure Management?
Preemptive Exposure Management shifts the focus from cataloging existing vulnerabilities to preventing them. This approach enables organizations to anticipate exposures before they become exploitable, maintain continuous real-time visibility, prioritize based on actual business risk rather than theoretical scores, and receive automated remediation guidance.
The result? Teams stay ahead of threats instead of constantly responding to them.
ZEST Security in the Global Attack Surface Grid Report
Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction in Action
Building on preemptive exposure management, Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction actively and continuously minimizes the points of potential compromise across an organization's digital infrastructure. Unlike periodic assessments that quickly become outdated, this approach provides continuous visibility and enables real-time reduction of security exposures.
The Modern Attack Surface Challenge
Cloud infrastructure, remote work, third-party integrations, shadow IT, and connected devices have expanded the enterprise attack surface exponentially. Organizations struggle with unknown assets creating blind spots, daily infrastructure changes introducing new exposures, and hybrid multi-cloud environments that are difficult to monitor comprehensively.
ZEST's Solution
ZEST Security provides continuous visibility into your attack surface with context-driven insights that help teams understand which exposures pose the greatest risk. By automating identification and assessment, we enable organizations to maintain an optimized security posture even as infrastructure evolves, aligned with our preemptive approach to identifying and addressing risks before exploitation.
ZEST Security in the Preemptive Cybersecurity Report
Automated Security Control Assessment
Automated Security Control Assessment evolves security from manual, point-in-time evaluations to continuous, automated validation of security controls. Organizations can verify their defenses are functioning as intended without the delays and resource requirements of manual testing, shifting from detecting and responding to breaches to preventing them.
The Challenge: Too Much Data, Not Enough Context
Security teams don't lack vulnerability data—they lack the ability to make sense of it. Organizations deploy numerous tools that identify thousands of potential issues, but without context, teams can't determine which vulnerabilities pose genuine risk or how to prioritize remediation.
ZEST's AI-Powered Solution
ZEST Security bridges this gap with AI-powered analysis that translates vulnerability data into actionable remediation pathways. Our platform continuously validates security control effectiveness, identifies coverage gaps before exploitation, prioritizes based on actual risk exposure rather than just scores, and automates assessment workflows that would otherwise consume significant manual effort.
A Comprehensive Preemptive Security Strategy
These three Gartner reports address complementary aspects of a unified goal: reducing organizational risk before breaches occur.
Preemptive Exposure Management establishes the foundational philosophy of staying ahead of threats. Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction minimizes exposure points across your infrastructure. Automated Security Control Assessment validates that defenses protecting those exposure points function effectively.
Together, they create a complete preemptive security lifecycle:
- Anticipate potential exposures before they become vulnerabilities
- Minimize attack surface by eliminating unnecessary exposures
- Validate that security controls function as intended
- Remediate issues that pose actual business risk
ZEST Security's recognition in all three reports reflects our holistic approach. We provide the context and guidance needed for effective action across the entire security lifecycle.
What This Means for ZEST Customers
This triple recognition validates the strategic value our platform delivers:
Preemptive operations: Move from reactive firefighting to proactive risk prevention across all security aspects.
Continuous visibility: Understand your attack surface, exposures, and security posture in real-time, not just during periodic assessments.
AI-powered intelligence: Process security data at scale and identify what matters most.
Actionable guidance: Get clear remediation pathways, not just alerts and scores.
Integrated platform: Address exposure management, attack surface reduction, and control validation in one solution.
Industry Validation
ZEST Security's inclusion in three Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar reports within six months signals a broader industry shift toward preemptive security. Organizations increasingly recognize that traditional reactive models can't keep pace with modern threats driven by cloud adoption, DevOps practices, remote work, and sophisticated attack techniques.
Gartner's focus on these capabilities in their emerging technology research indicates they're becoming essential requirements for effective risk management, not optional add-ons.
The Future Belongs to Preemptive Security
As threat actors grow more sophisticated and attack surfaces expand, organizations can't rely solely on detection and response. The future belongs to security teams that proactively identify and eliminate risk before breaches occur.
ZEST Security continues innovating at the forefront of this evolution, developing capabilities that help security teams work smarter, reduce risk, and protect their organizations more effectively through intelligent automation, continuous assessment, context-driven prioritization, and preemptive action.
Get Started with ZEST Security
Ready to implement preemptive exposure management, dynamic attack surface reduction, and automated security control assessment? Our free AI-based remediation risk assessment provides a practical starting point for understanding your current security posture and identifying priority improvements.
Try our free remediation risk assessment today and shift from reactive to proactive security operations.
