How Cloud Detection and Response with Illumio Insights Helps You Stay Compliant

In late 2018, hotel giant Marriott International disclosed a massive data breach that had compromised the personal information of up to 500 million guests.  

The breach had gone undetected for years, originating from a vulnerability in a guest reservation system.  

What made the incident even more painful was the compliance fallout. Beyond lost customer and investor trust, Marriott was ultimately fined £18.4 million under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It later agreed to a $52 million settlement initiated by 50 U.S. state attorneys general.  

Organizations in every sector, from healthcare to finance to critical infrastructure, face the same compliance pressures — and failures. Regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and DORA demand more than strong security controls.  

Cloud detection and response (CDR) solutions like Illumio Insights can ease that burden.  

By improving visibility, automating evidence collection, and helping teams detect and contain threats faster, CDR doesn’t just boost cybersecurity posture but makes compliance a lot more achievable.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• Why cybersecurity compliance is so hard today, especially in the cloud
• The pain points compliance teams face that CDR can help solve
• How CDR tools support regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, DORA, and more
• What makes Illumio Insights uniquely helpful for compliance leaders

The cloud security compliance problem

Your security team doesn’t just have to keep your environments safe. You also have to prove they’re safe to meet compliance regulations.

That’s no easy task when environments are sprawling across hybrid and multi-cloud platforms, each with their own configurations, policies, and limitations.  

The more complex the environment, the more blind spots you’re likely to have.

What’s changed?

• Cloud complexity. Organizations rely on IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services from multiple vendors. But compliance requires unified reporting and consistent policy enforcement. ‍
• Operational gaps. Legacy security tools weren’t built for the cloud. They struggle to keep up with fast-moving, ephemeral workloads. ‍
• Increased regulatory pressure. Laws like GDPR, DORA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS have raised the bar for breach notification timelines, data protection requirements, and risk management protocols.

All of this creates a compliance environment where doing the right thing isn’t enough. You have to document it, demonstrate it, and defend it.

What makes cybersecurity compliance so hard?

Security and compliance teams are increasingly aligned. But they’re still often speaking different languages.  

Compliance leaders want auditable controls and logs. Security teams want to stop breaches before they happen.

When your tools don’t support both priorities, pain follows.

Here are some of the most common pain points we hear from compliance-driven organizations and how a cloud detection and response solution like Illumio Insights helps:

1. Lack of visibility into east-west traffic

Many regulations require monitoring and logging of internal traffic. It’s not just about what’s coming in and out of the network. In the cloud, lateral movement is notoriously hard to see.

CDR solves this. By continuously monitoring traffic between workloads and cloud services, CDR tools like Insights give teams real-time, fine-grained observability into east-west movement.  

With Insights, you get this visibility across hybrid, multi-cloud, and even on-premises environments.

2. Slow incident detection and response times

Regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) require organizations to report breaches within strict timeframes.  

But if you can’t detect a threat quickly, you can’t contain it or report it accurately.

Insights detects suspicious behaviors, such as unusual traffic patterns or access to sensitive workloads, and prioritizes what matters most so teams can respond faster.

3. Scattered audit data

Cloud logs are siloed by platform. Trying to gather and normalize audit data from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and on-premises tools is a nightmare.

CDR tools unify observability across environments. With Insights, compliance teams can collect, store, and search threat detection data in one place. This makes audits faster and easier.

4. Can’t prove risk reduction

It’s not enough to block threats. Regulators want to see that you’ve actively reduced risk and enforced security policies.

Insights maps risk exposure in real time. This shows how policies reduce attack paths and helps you document risk reduction to share with auditors.

Which regulations can CDR help you comply with?

Cloud detection and response isn’t a magic compliance switch. But it’s a powerful ally when mapped to regulatory goals.

Here’s how CDR solutions like Insights help organizations meet key requirements from major cybersecurity regulations:

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

The GDPR Article 32 requires organizations to implement “appropriate technical and organizational measures” to ensure data security and to detect and report breaches within 72 hours.

CDR tools support this by offering continuous monitoring across cloud workloads and data flows. This helps security teams identify anomalous access to personal data before it becomes a breach.  

They also enable organizations to document the timeline and scope of an incident which is critical when notifying regulators.  

Insights goes further by:

• Surfacing events that suggest possible data access violations
• Highlighting how long an attacker may have been present in the environment
• Visualizing the lateral movement that took place

This level of context is not only invaluable during breach response but supports data protection impact assessments with the kind of clarity that GDPR demands.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)

For organizations governed by HIPAA, the focus is on protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of protected health information (PHI).  

Healthcare organizations also need to ensure that security incidents involving PHI are detected and addressed promptly.  

CDR solutions play a key role by monitoring systems that handle PHI and flagging suspicious activity that could indicate compromise. They also track and log user behavior across cloud environments, offering a forensic trail of who accessed what and when.  

Insights enhances this capability. It pinpoints suspicious connections to PHI-hosting workloads and identifies lateral movement that could signal the early stages of an attack.

This provides the evidence security teams need to meet HIPAA Security Rule requirements and respond to audits or breach inquiries with confidence.

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)

PCI DSS imposes strict requirements around network segmentation, logging, and monitoring for all systems that touch cardholder data.  

CDR solutions help meet these requirements by detecting unauthorized access attempts. They give you visibility into which workloads and services are communicating and whether they should be in the first place.  

Insights helps organizations maintain PCI DSS compliance by mapping all communication paths in and out of cardholder data environments in real time. This makes it clear when access patterns deviate from policy.  

It also detects risky behaviors or policy violations in real time. It generates detailed logs that can be used to support investigations, internal reviews, or third-party audits.

DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act)

DORA has introduced a new layer of compliance for financial institutions operating in the EU. It emphasizes the importance of information and communication technology (ICT) risk management, threat detection, incident response, and demonstrating resilience in the face of disruption.  

CDR supports DORA by continuously monitoring digital infrastructure and flagging operational disruptions as they happen. This gives teams the chance to act before issues escalate.  

Insights makes this actionable by surfacing high-impact threats that directly affect business-critical operations.  

It also helps organizations develop risk response frameworks. It shows how attacks progress and how they can be stopped. Then, it provides the historical data needed to prove to regulators that response and recovery procedures are effective and repeatable.

Why Illumio Insights is built for compliance-driven security teams

While many detection tools focus on finding every possible alert, Illumio Insights focuses on what matters most. This means teams aren’t buried in noise when time is critical.

Here’s what makes Illumio Insights uniquely useful for security teams under pressure to meet compliance standards:

• Cloud-native observability, no agents required. Insights delivers observability without the burden of deploying agents on every workload. That makes it faster to deploy, especially in highly regulated or complex environments where agent installation is difficult or restricted. ‍
• Risk-based alerting. Insights prioritizes detection based on business risk. This helps you focus on the threats that matter most, such as unusual access to critical databases or policy violations in regulated zones. ‍
• Proven breach containment integration. Insights pairs detection with containment by integrating with Illumio Segmentation. This allows you to proactively restrict lateral movement and prove that you've taken steps to reduce blast radius — a key requirement in many regulations. ‍
• Audit-ready reporting. Need to prove what happened, when, and how you responded? Insights gives you the timelines, event context, and impact analysis to back up your reports. ‍
• Supports every environment. Whether you’re operating in AWS, Azure, GCP, or in on-premises or hybrid environments, Insights unifies your detection and response strategy in one console.

Insights gives compliance-driven teams the clarity, speed, and evidence they need to stay ahead of both attackers and auditors. It turns fragmented cloud environments into environments you can understand, control, and confidently defend.

Cloud detection and response is key to confident compliance

Regulations may vary by industry or geography, but they all share a common goal: reduce risk, protect critical data, and stay resilient in the face of threats.

It’s critical to remember that compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. CDR solutions like Insights help you build a security foundation that’s strong, auditable, and resilient to change.

By delivering deep observability, accelerating breach response, and proving containment, Insights makes it easier to meet compliance requirements and go beyond them.

Try Illumio Insights free today and discover how better detection leads to better compliance.