Sophie Bovy
What the Gartner® Emerging Tech Impact Radar for Cloud Security says about response capability - and why it might be time to look beyond the cloud
The Gartner Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Cloud Security (2025) explores 12 innovation areas shaping how security leaders protect increasingly complex environments. Most fall squarely into familiar categories - prevention, detection, and posture management.
But in the mid-term adoption ring, a quieter signal appears:
Cloud Investigation and Response Automation (CIRA).
It’s not the biggest bubble on the chart. It’s not yet mainstream. But it speaks to something that’s often overlooked - not just where we detect threats, but how we respond.
A Shift in Priorities
Gartner points out that investigation and response have traditionally taken a back seat to compliance and preventive controls.
That’s starting to change:
“The adoption of CIRA is expected to rise, driven by typical buyer demand for IR, which accounts for approximately 4% of the interest observed in Gartner’s search analytics for overall security.”
In other words, teams are starting to look for more than alerts. They want answers - fast, conclusive, and cross-environment.
The Challenge with Cloud-Centric Forensics
“Cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) technologies impede some adoption of CIRA because it is a starting point in cloud IR and forensic activities, despite lacking the deep capabilities of CIRA.”
That single line surfaces an important question:
Are cloud forensics features enough - or do teams need something deeper?
Gartner also notes the challenge of overlapping tools and customer hesitation as vendors blur the lines between detection and investigation. The takeaway? Organizations need to be deliberate in how they build response capabilities, especially in hybrid environments.
A Signal Worth Following
“Enhance forensics and IR to address multiple environments rather than just clouds by including on-premises traditional systems, identity, cloud workloads and mobile endpoints...”
For organizations operating across cloud and on-prem, this is a clear call to look beyond convenience and toward readiness.
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Gartner, Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Cloud Security, Mark Wah, Charanpal Bhogal, 29 January 2025.
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