I started in security in the late 2000s doing intrusion detection and incident response. Since then, the world has undergone a cloud native renaissance, but security monitoring largely looks the same. Although detection has shifted from network traffic analysis to runtime inspection, most innovation focuses on making sensors more computationally efficient.Security monitoring remains important in cloud native environments, but it’s too often considered the only aspect of security. In 2025, the biggest security companies still build glorified dashboards and log generators. The premise is simple: The cloud is insecure, so monitor everything and alert engineers when something looks suspicious. Ad infinitum.This mirrors the Sisyphean task of remediating vulnerabilities in container images — until hardened images from companies like Chainguard, Minimus and Docker emerged. These companies didn’t build improved scanners; they simply removed vulnerabilities.Instead of adding more runtime detection, it’s time we just remove the vulnerabilities.The Fundamental Flaw in Detection-First SecurityMonitoring logs doesn’t make compute more secure — it just tells you when someone’s exploited existing insecurities. This reactive approach is like installing surveillance cameras on a home with no locks. Security logs also burden engineers who must translate esoteric OS system calls into attacker behaviors and make split-second incident response decisions.Security logs don’t just consume finite engineering cognition and time — they drain resources through expensive security information and event management systems (SIEMs) and log sinks. A recent Honeycomb report finds observability costs typically account for 15 to 25% of infrastructure bills.The economics are unsustainable. We’re directing precious security resources not toward hardening and making computing secure from the start, but toward building improved dashboards highlighting ever-growing vulnerability lists and sophisticated alert systems. According to the “Incident Response 2024 Report” by Palo Alto, “Nearly 45% of incidents lead to data loss in under 24 hours.” Defenders have hours — not days — to respond, creating an impossible race.The industry response? Use AI to make detection faster. But physics doesn’t lie: No matter how fast detection large language models (LLMs) become, they fundamentally cannot prevent attacks if underlying components are insecure by design. You cannot monitor your way out of insecure defaults.The Prevention Revolution Is Already HereA new generation of security companies is emerging with a radically different philosophy: Prevent attacks rather than detect them. This isn’t incremental improvement — it’s a paradigm shift, making traditional monitoring against insecure defaults largely irrelevant.The transformation is under way with organizations mitigating container image vulnerabilities before production deployment — no more hoping runtime detection catches every vulnerability or malicious container. Teams now prevent attacks at the container runtime level itself. Instead of monitoring for runtime attacks, companies like Edera build hardened runtimes where escapes are architecturally infeasible, envisioning entirely new stacks that are secure by design.Why Prevention Will Win the MarketMarket demand for prevention-focused security accelerates as organizations face economic reality: They’re drowning in security alerts. The average enterprise receives over 11,000 security alerts daily, with security teams investigating fewer than 49%, creating unsustainable burnout and false negatives that prevention eliminates.Secure-by-default measures scale independently of infrastructure size, keeping cost constant as architecture grows, while security monitoring scales linearly with component count. Compliance frameworks increasingly favor preventive over reactive controls, making it easier to demonstrate attack improbability than prove adequate detection and response speed.Most critically, there aren’t enough skilled security engineers to staff 24/7 SOCs and manually investigate alerts, making prevention’s reduced reliance on humans not just attractive but necessary for organizational survival.Prevention So Good, Every Alert Has a PurposeIn computing stacks secure by design, monitoring plays a different role. Secure defaults reduce engineering cognitive load from false positives and infrastructure costs, and make most alerts irrelevant.This isn’t theoretical. Eliminating attack surfaces rather than monitoring for attacks dramatically reduces alert volume because underlying vulnerabilities don’t exist to exploit. Remaining alerts actually warrant investigation.The security operations future looks radically different: Engineers focus on velocity and faster market delivery rather than alert triage, incident response teams shrink as incidents become rare, SIEM investments shift toward audit and compliance instead of threat hunting and security budgets reallocate from detection tools to prevention platforms.The Industry Transformation AheadCompanies dominating the next security decade aren’t building better monitoring dashboards or faster alert systems — they’re building computing platforms where attacks are prevented by design, not detected after the fact.The market is responding. Prevention-focused security companies see unprecedented growth while traditional SIEM and monitoring vendors struggle with commoditization. Enterprises adopting prevention-first strategies gain competitive advantages: lower operational overhead, reduced security staffing requirements and dramatically improved security postures.This transformation won’t happen overnight, but it’s inevitable. Moore’s Law favors prevention over detection, and economics increasingly do, too. Organizations recognizing this shift early and investing in prevention-first architectures will achieve fundamentally more secure and operationally efficient positions.The Sisyphean task of responding to endless security alerts is ending. The future belongs to systems where those alerts never generate in the first place.The question isn’t whether monitoring will become obsolete, it’s how quickly your organization will embrace the prevention revolution, making it much less relevant.The post Is the End of Detection-Based Security Here? appeared first on The New Stack.