Way Beyond Visibility: How Illumio Insights Connects Your Critical Security Dots

“You can’t protect what you can’t see.” It’s one of the basic truths in cybersecurity.

But in today’s threat landscape, seeing what’s happening in your network isn’t enough. You need to understand it. Organizations must make sense of all the interactions, dependencies, and patterns in their environment to figure out what matters — and just as important, ignore what doesn't.

That’s where observability comes in, and it’s why we're so excited to announce Illumio Insights.

An AI-powered breakthrough in CDR

Insights is the first cloud detection and response (CDR) solution built on an AI security graph. As a key part of our breach containment platform, Insights can observe and protect every workload and resource across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

It visualizes dangerous traffic and behavior and highlights lateral movement risks across environments. Beyond identifying risks, Insights also detects active attacks and lets you contain them with a single click.

Visibility is good. Observability is better.

Visibility tells you what is happening. Observability tells you why it’s happening.

Visibility is static. It’s about collecting telemetry: who talked to who, which port, what protocol, when. It gives you a surface-level picture of your environment.

Observability, on the other hand, gives you context. It helps you understand behavior, surface anomalies, and assess risk based on how things are supposed to work versus what’s actually going on.

Think of visibility as the security camera footage. Observability is the detective watching that footage and figuring out the story behind it.

Why has observability been so difficult?

For years, achieving real observability in security has been almost impossible.

The challenge isn’t a lack of signals. It’s the opposite: signal overload. Security teams are drowning in data, from logs, agents, sensors, cloud platforms, and more.

Worse still, this data is often incomplete, siloed, and devoid of context. Analysts spend hours stitching together clues from multiple tools, trying to piece together what happened — and whether it even matters.

And then there’s the issue of false positives. The tools we’ve relied on flood teams with alerts that offer little to no actionable insight. Alert fatigue is real and growing.

It’s no wonder so many teams are stuck in reactive firefighting mode.

Why observability matters now

Observability is more crucial than ever because the environment has changed.  

Threat actors are faster. More sophisticated. AI allows attackers to quickly customize their approach to your network’s unique vulnerabilities.

And hybrid, multi-cloud environments are the new normal — with far more complexity than most teams can handle manually.

Traditional visibility tools weren’t built for this. They can’t keep up. And no matter how much you’ve invested in cybersecurity tools, breaches are inevitable.

Security teams need a better way to cut through the noise, focus on what matters, and respond faster. They need observability — the kind that gives them the full story in real time.

Why you should care about observability

Cyber resilience isn’t about avoiding breaches. It’s about limiting the impact. Observability is key to doing that well.

With observability:

• Security teams get clarity. According to The Global Cost of Ransomware Study, 46% of organizations struggle to respond to ransomware because they lack the ability to quickly identify attacks. With observability, teams can focus on what’s important, not just what’s noisy. ‍
• Investigations get faster. No more sifting through mountains of logs trying to reconstruct events. Observability speeds up the process of identifying, mitigating, and resolving attacks. And that reduces the impact — and cost — of a breach. ‍
• Operations get smarter. Teams can automate containment and response based on real-time risk, not static rules. ‍
• Compliance regulations get met. Cyber resilience, rapid incident response, and a clearer view of your environments are becoming compliance imperatives in regulations like NIS2, DORA, and even the UK’s newly proposed Cyber Security and Resilience Bill.

Most important, observability aligns security with business context. It helps CISOs and CIOs answer questions like: “What’s really at risk?” and “Where should we prioritize investment?” It’s the kind of insight that’s essential in today’s boardrooms.

AI-powered observability with Insights

At Illumio, we believe observability is foundational to Zero Trust and it’s critical for cyber resilience.

Insights combines the power of AI with a graph-based security approach for observability and breach containment across the hybrid multi-cloud.  

Insights is built to help organizations understand risk in real time across complex environments. It’s about surfacing actionable insights that help you reduce exposure and respond faster.

With AI, we can analyze massive amounts of telemetry across cloud, data center, and endpoint environments, and then surface and prioritize what’s actually at risk.  

Graph-based modeling adds the “why.” It maps relationships and dependencies, so you don’t just know that something happened, but why it might matter and what it’s connected to.

This is crucial for the future of cybersecurity. Instead of just knowing that a workload communicated with another, you now know if that communication was expected, if it violates policy, and if it could be part of a larger attack chain.

It’s a shift from being alert-driven to being intelligence-driven.  

And when you combine this with segmentation — controlling how things can communicate across your network — you’ve got a powerful combination. You’re not just seeing and understanding risk; you’re proactively and reactively containing it.

Want to see Illumio Insights in action? Register today for our webinar, Introducing Illumio Insights: AI Cloud Detection and Response.