1. Eliminate Exposure Windows

Prevention blocks misconfigurations at deployment time. Resources never exist in production with security issues. The window between misconfiguration and fix - which typically spans hours, days, or weeks - simply doesn't exist. Issues that never reach production can't be exploited.

This matters more than most organizations realize. Cloud breach investigations routinely discover that attackers exploited misconfigurations that existed for days or weeks between deployment and detection. Public S3 buckets exposing sensitive data. Overly permissive security groups allowing unauthorized access. Unencrypted databases storing customer information. These issues lived in production because detection found them after deployment.

Prevention inverts this timeline. Organization policies block risky API calls before resources get created. Secure defaults ensure encryption and access controls are enabled automatically. IaC scanning catches issues during pull requests before code merges. Issues that preventive controls block never create risk. The exposure window is zero.

Consider the difference for a public S3 bucket. With detection, the bucket exists publicly for days between deployment and remediation. During that window, anyone can access the data. With prevention, an organization policy blocks the public configuration at creation time. The bucket is never public. The data is never exposed. The risk never exists.

This elimination of exposure windows reduces risk more effectively than any amount of detection. Fast detection finds issues quickly. Prevention ensures many issues never exist to be found.