When 'cloud-native' means your data lives elsewhere

The cybersecurity industry loves new words. “Cloud-native”, “AI-powered”, “next-generation”. But underneath the marketing, much of the technology is the same as it was a decade ago. What’s genuinely new is the business model - and the price you pay for it.

Same technology, new delivery model

A lot of what’s sold as modern security is familiar methods repackaged for cloud delivery. That isn’t wrong in itself. The problem starts when “cloud-native” in practice means all your telemetry - logs, events, perhaps the contents of your network traffic - has to be sent to the vendor’s infrastructure for the product to work at all. The capability you’re buying assumes your data leaves your control.

The dependency is the real product

When your security stops working the moment the connection to the vendor drops, you haven’t bought a tool - you’ve rented a dependency. That means someone else decides your uptime, the jurisdiction your data lives under, and what happens the day the terms change. For some organisations that’s an acceptable trade-off. For those responsible for something critical to society, it rarely is.

Ask what happens when the line is down

One simple test reveals most of it: how much of your security keeps working if the connection to the vendor disappears? If the answer is “not much”, you’re more dependent than you think. Dovre is built on the opposite premise - that detection, analysis and response should work fully on your own infrastructure, whether the line is up or not. New packaging isn’t the same as new capability. It’s the capability that counts.