01
The host rule declares the context it cares about
Reachability, environment and standing vulnerability state — authored alongside the rule, with the direction each pushes the severity, rather than coded into the engine.
Contextual severity · workloads & hostsA finding on a host
A finding on a host
inherits that host's risk.
Host and VM scan rules carry one severity each, so the same finding reads identically on a locked-down internal jump box and on a public production node that is already carrying a vulnerability being exploited in the wild. Cloudanix scores the finding against the host it fired on — reachability, environment, and standing vulnerability state.
- Per host, not per rule
- Reuses the same exposure and environment resolvers
- Stamped at scan time, with the reason kept
cloudanix · vmscan · effective severity
host ruleSensitive File Modified Outside Change Windowbase: High
i-0a7c3 · web-prod-04
- internet reachable↑
- production—
- carries exploited CVE↑
effective severityCriticalHigh → Critical · escalated
i-0f912 · bastion-dev
- private subnet only↓
- non-production↓
- no known-exploited CVE—
effective severityLowHigh → Low · unreachable host
The rule fired identically on both hosts. Only one of them is a host an attacker can get to.
The problem
Workload queues inherit every problem of static severity, plus one more.
Host findings arrive at volume, from fleets where the hosts differ enormously — and the rule severity knows nothing about which host it landed on.
01
Fleets are not uniform
One rule evaluates your public web tier, your internal batch workers and your developer sandboxes. A single severity cannot be right for all three, so it is wrong for at least two.
02
Vulnerability state is ignored
A configuration finding on a host that already carries an actively exploited vulnerability is a meaningfully worse finding. Static severity has no way to express that compounding.
03
Host context lives in another tool
Teams know which hosts are exposed — it is just in a different console from the scan results, so nobody joins the two at triage time. That join is what a graph is for.
How it works
How a workload finding gets its severity.
The same model as posture findings, resolved against the host. Because a VM host is already a first-class asset in the graph, the exposure and environment context built for posture findings applies here without change.
02
The scan resolves the host's context
As findings are staged, the host's graph context is read once for the whole batch. Cost scales with the hosts a contextual rule actually touches, not with the size of the fleet.
03
The effective severity is stamped
Scored at scan time and carried through the finding record and its aggregations, along with the factors that fired. A host event is a record of a moment, so its severity describes the risk at that moment.
04
Reads and alerts follow
The finding list, the host summary widgets, the severity filter and the workload alert threshold all resolve the same value — including the alert gate, which is a separate code path and has to be brought along deliberately.
The factors
The context a host finding is weighed against.
Your hosts are already modelled in the graph, so the exposure and environment context you get on posture findings applies here too — nothing extra to deploy or maintain.
Host reachability
Whether the host is actually reachable from the internet, resolved through security groups, subnets, load balancers and route tables rather than read off a flag.
Environment
Production versus everything else, from the workspace's own environment model. Already live for posture findings and shared here.
Known-exploited vulnerability
Whether the host already carries a vulnerability under active exploitation. Pairs naturally with Zero-Day Watch, which is what keeps that judgement fresh.
Data handling
Whether the workload processes or stores regulated data. A finding on a host handling customer records deserves more of your morning than the same finding on a stateless worker.
Attached identity privilege
How far the instance profile or workload identity attached to this host can reach. Compromise of a host is compromise of its identity.
Why Cloudanix
What changes when host findings know their host.
Compounding risk becomes visible
Exposed, production, and already carrying an exploited CVE is a genuinely different situation from any one of those alone. Signed steps let the finding say so instead of flattening it.
No new agent, no new pipeline
The host is already a node in the graph the platform maintains for inventory and attack paths. Contextual severity is a correlation over data you are already collecting.
One severity vocabulary across surfaces
Posture, events and workloads are all reported the same way, with the same explanations, so a responder never has to learn a per-module ranking scheme.
What Our Users Are Saying
Customer Reviews
Cloudanix is trusted by security leaders worldwide to deliver proactive, reliable, and cutting-edge cloud security.
One day, I changed the password of a root account, and my CTO called me within less than a minute to confirm if I did so. I was not expecting a reaction this quick. He told me Cloudanix alerted him of this password change and that he wanted to confirm as it was a critical security notification. I couldn't believe it!
Ritesh Agarwal
CEO, Airgap Networks
Compliance is one way of staying secure, but what I want is the ability to go deeper and attain 'true security.' Cloudanix provides us the capability to do so.
Vishal Madan
Head of Engineering, iMocha
Cloudanix is building for the future of the cloud, which makes the product all the more desirable.
Ritesh Agarwal
CEO, Airgap Networks
Cloudanix gave us the visibility we were missing. Being able to move from permanent access to a robust Just-In-Time (JIT) workflow has fundamentally changed our security posture without slowing down our engineering velocity.
Pavan Kumar Lekkala
SRE Lead, HugoHub
We are excited to leverage Cloudanix's comprehensive multi-cloud DevSecOps solution to secure our production workloads on AWS. Cloudanix has demonstrated that it can solve many challenges that DevSecOps teams face while continually adding new features such as SOC2 compliance and drift detection.
Satish Mohan
Co-founder & CTO, Airgap Networks
Managing third-party partner access was once a major concern for our security posture. With Cloudanix JIT Cloud, we've effectively achieved zero third-party risk. We can now grant access confidently, knowing that it is temporary, audited, and automatically revoked, resulting in a 100% reduction in our privileged access exposure.
Okesh Badhiye
Head of Technical Engineering, Finfinity
The snooze feature and responsible alerts have helped us save time and prioritize what to tackle first.
Satish Mohan
Co-founder & CTO, Airgap Networks
Implementing Cloudanix JIT internally allowed us to practice what we preach. By eliminating permanent access to our own clouds and databases, we've neutralized the risk of standing privileges, ensuring our own 'keys to the kingdom' are never left exposed.
Girish Manghnani
Managing Partner, Tech Inspira
The problem with permissions is a lot of times, the gaps are left open due to oversights from inside the organization itself. With Cloudanix's CIEM, we get a complete view of user permissions and access. This enables us to update the permissions, reducing the attack surface.
Nilesh Pethani
Application Architect, iMocha
In the world of Fintech, trust is our currency. Cloudanix provided the frictionless visibility we needed to secure our EKS workloads across AWS, ensuring we stay audit-ready for SOC2 and GDPR without slowing down our engineering velocity.
Amol Naik
Head of Security & Infrastructure, HugoHub
Cloudanix delivered value within 5 minutes of onboarding. Continuous monitoring, timely detection, and excellent documentation helped us attain a great cloud security posture.
Divyanshu Shukla
Senior DevSecOps, Meesho
Technology strategies and business strategies are in a state of constant change which includes centralization and decentralization of responsibilities. Regardless of strategic shift, we still have intellectual property to protect. Cloudanix are critical partners for us in our public cloud security posture across our three cloud providers.
Jerry Locke
Senior Director Global Solutions Engineering, Eversana
Cloudanix has been amazing. They opened up a common Slack channel with us — and it feels like we are talking to our own team and getting things done with Cloud security. The support team is always available, friendly, helpful, and ready to go out of their way.
Satish Mohan
CTO, Airgap Networks
Beyond just access management, Cloudanix CSPM has given us a unified view of our AWS environment. The real-time alerting and anomaly detection allow us to prevent any untoward activity before it happens, which is critical for a marketplace connecting 50+ financial institutions.
Okesh Badhiye
Head of Technical Engineering, Finfinity
For a Fintech company, data is our most valuable — and most sensitive — asset. Cloudanix DAM hasn't just improved our visibility; it has given us control. The ability to mask data and prevent unauthorized queries in real-time is a game-changer for our compliance and customer trust.
Jiten Gala
President Engineering and Product, Kapittx
Our clients, especially in the Middle East financial sector, demand absolute accountability. Cloudanix JIT Cloud has been a competitive differentiator for us, allowing us to provide secure, governed access to customer accounts that meet their strictest audit and compliance requirements.
Girish Manghnani
Managing Partner, Tech Inspira
Cloudanix is always on my team's lips because of its exceptional support. Be it a small or big query, Cloudanix has gone above and beyond to resolve them. This one's a keeper for us.
Sujit Karpe
CTO, iMocha
For a long-lasting partnership, great support goes a long way. Cloudanix has delivered exceptional support whenever required. Their edge is their team is always ready to go beyond to solve any issues that we have. This speaks volumes about the culture at Cloudanix.
Akash Maheshwari
Co-founder, MoveInSync
Beyond the technology, Cloudanix feels like an extension of our own team. Their willingness to stand up a dedicated Middle East tenant for us and provide exceptional support at a sensible price makes them a long-term partner for Hugosave.
Surya Tamada
CTO, HugoHub
The real-time notifications that Cloudanix provides are a real lifesaver. Their adaptive notifications ensure that my team stays productive and doesn't get interrupted all the time.
Digvijay Singh
Staff Security Engineer, Meesho
The whole point in technological evolution is to help improve the world we live in. We must protect that and to do so requires an effective and efficient security strategy. The Cloudanix team helped make our public cloud security posture management strategy a reality. The symbiotic relationship we have allows for a continuous feedback loop which is how business should operate.
Larry Wheat
Staff Solutions Engineer, Eversana
Common questions
Asked plainly.
What is contextual severity for workloads?
It is host-finding severity decided by the host it fired on instead of fixed on the rule. The finding is weighed against that host's resolved reachability, environment and standing vulnerability state, and arrives with the conditions that produced its severity recorded alongside it. The model is described in full on the overview.
Does this apply to CVEs and vulnerability findings?
No — deliberately. CVE severity comes from CVSS and exploit intelligence at the finding level, not from a rule, so it has no rule-severity to adjust. That problem is handled separately by vulnerability prioritization and Zero-Day Watch. Here, vulnerability state is an input: a host carrying an exploited CVE escalates its configuration findings.
Is severity recomputed if a host later becomes exposed?
Not for events already recorded. A host event is a record of something that happened, so it keeps the severity that matched the host's context at the time it fired, and future firings pick up the new context. If you need past events re-scored when a host's exposure changes, tell us — it is a request we are tracking rather than shipped behaviour.
Does the workload alert threshold respect it?
Yes — and it matters that it does. Your host finding lists, summary widgets, severity filters and workload alert thresholds all resolve the same severity, so setting a threshold on Critical means what you expect rather than quietly using an older number.
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