February 26, 2026
What Hundreds of Conversations Taught Us About Remediating Cloud Issues
Patrick Guay
CRO, Tamnoon
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Nobody wants another cloud security tool. We heard that loud and clear after engaging with cloud security professionals across hundreds of conversations.
But the same six themes did keep surfacing. The same frustrations and blockers showing up again and again across industries, company sizes, and tech stacks.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: detection isn’t the problem anymore. The tools work, CNAPPs find things, scanners scan, and dashboards light up like Christmas trees. The problem is what happens next.
The gap between “we found a risk” and “we fixed it” is where most cloud security programs stall. In many cases, it’s an operational or technical problem, yet many organizations still treat remediation as a discipline rather than an afterthought, widening the gap.
Over the coming weeks, we will share the six themes we heard most often. It’s not comfortable reading, but if you’re responsible for reducing cloud security risk in 2026, you’ll probably recognize every single one.
1. Nobody knows who owns what
Before you can fix a problem, you need to know who’s responsible for it. And in most organizations, that question alone can stall remediation for days or weeks.
Our conversations revealed a few key insights:
- Ownership is murky and asset tagging is inconsistent.
- Documentation is outdated or nonexistent.
- Tribal knowledge walks out the door when people leave.
Security teams spot the risk, confirm it’s real, and then spend their time playing detective instead of fixing anything.
"It's a hide-and-seek type of adventure to find ownership."
– Large tech company
What’s at stake
- MTTR starts climbing before any actual remediation begins.
- Findings sit in queues while teams navigate org charts and ticketing systems.
- Issues stay open, leading to prolonged exposure.
The solution
Organizations need systems that automatically map assets to owners and route findings to the right teams. When ownership is baked into the workflow, remediation can start on day one.
2. The Talent Gap Is Structural
Before you can fix a problem, you need to know who’s responsible for it. And in most organizations, that question alone can stall remediation for days or weeks.
Across our conversations, we learned:
- Cloud and security teams are tiny relative to their workloads.
- Detection is outpacing remediation capacity by an order of magnitude.
- Specialized cloud expertise is rare, hard to hire, and harder to retain.
"We've been looking at these alerts for over a year due to staffing issues. We're not able to get anything done."
– Mid-sized technology company
What’s at stake
- Teams have visibility into risk but lack the capacity to act on it.
- Alert backlogs grow while skilled staff spend their time triaging instead of remediating.
- Knowledge gaps create dependency on a small number of individuals.
The solution
Hiring alone won’t close this gap. Organizations need to multiply the effectiveness of their people by offloading repetitive triage work to safe automation while also bringing in specialized remediation expertise on demand to validate fixes.
3. Alert Fatigue Has Broken Trust
Cloud security tools are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: find risk. The problem is they’re finding too much of it, and a significant portion turns out to be noise.
We heard these same complaints again and again:
- CNAPPs generate massive volumes of findings, often in the millions.
- A large share of alerts are low value, duplicates, or false positives.
- Analysts spend most of their time validating alerts rather than fixing them.
"The alerts in our CNAPP, we're talking about millions. It's overwhelming."
– Large web services company
What’s at stake
- Teams tune out alerts, increasing the chance that real risks get missed.
- Analysts burn hours validating findings instead of remediating them.
- Tool credibility suffers, making it harder to justify security investments.
The solution
Organizations need intelligent filtering that separates signal from noise before alerts reach an analyst. That means consolidating duplicates, validating automatically, and prioritizing based on business impact.
4. Remediation Is Slow, Manual, and Risky
Even when the right issue is identified and the right owner is found, the challenge of actually fixing it remains. Remediation workflows are manual, slow, and carry a real risk of breaking production.
These were the biggest complaints we heard:
- Remediation involves extensive manual work: triaging, investigating, opening tickets, chasing teams.
- Development teams see remediation as lower priority than feature work.
- Fear of breaking production makes teams hesitant to act on known risks.
"We can't get rid of that way over-permissioned role because we don't know what's going to break."
– Enterprise data analytics company
What’s at stake
- MTTR stretches into weeks or months.
- Backlogs continue to grow faster than teams can work through them.
- Hesitancy around automation leaves teams stuck in manual processes.
The solution
Automation is the only way to keep up, but it has to be safe. That means human-validated fixes, clear rollback paths, and remediation logic built on real-world expertise. When teams trust that automation won’t cause outages, they can move from firefighting to continuous risk reduction.
5. Silos and Permissions Block Even Obvious Fixes
All too often, everyone agrees that something is risky. The finding is validated, the owner is identified, and the fix is straightforward. But security still can’t implement the fix.
These were the most common challenges:
- Security teams identify issues but lack the permissions to remediate directly.
- Cloud and platform teams are overloaded and slow to respond.
- Separation of duties creates bottlenecks, even for low-complexity fixes
"That ticket has been sitting there since I joined. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon."
– Mid-sized life sciences company
What’s at stake
- Validated risks remain exposed due to organizational friction.
- Security teams lose credibility when issues they raise go unresolved.
- Remediation timelines depend on other teams’ priorities and capacity.
The solution
Organizations need remediation workflows that work within existing permission structures while driving accountability. Automated routing, clear escalation paths, and visibility into where tickets are stuck keeps issues from languishing.
6. Expensive Tools, Shrinking Budgets, No Clear Outcomes
Security leaders are caught between powerful tools with hefty price tags and finance teams demanding cost cuts and clear ROI.
A few typical pain points include:
- Tools like Wiz, Prisma, and Orca are capable but expensive and often underutilized.
- Many organizations are under mandates to reduce spend, not increase it.
- CNAPPs are widely described as “work generators” rather than solutions.
“The purpose of getting a CNAPP was to turn off Defender for Cloud… It's extraordinarily expensive.”
– Large healthcare company.
What’s at stake
- Security investments fail to deliver expected outcomes.
- Leadership loses confidence in the value of detection tools.
- Teams are stuck justifying spend instead of reducing risk.
The solution
Any new investment has to unlock value from existing tools or reduce costs elsewhere. The goal is to close issues, reduce exposure, and provide clear metrics. When remediation ties directly to outcomes, the ROI conversation gets easier.
Stop Finding Problems. Start Finishing Them
The pattern across all six themes is clear: cloud security has a follow-through problem.
Organizations have invested heavily in tools that find risk. But finding risk was never the hard part. The hard part is fixing it safely, consistently, and at scale while navigating talent shortages, alert overload, organizational friction, and shrinking budgets.
The gap between detection and remediation is where exposure lives. And until that gap closes, security posture will continue to be measured by dashboards instead of outcomes.
Ready to close the gap? Tamnoon finishes what CNAPPs start. We combine AI-powered automation with battle-tested remediation expertise to turn your alert backlog into closed issues. Safe, validated, and measurable.
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