Today we’re excited to announce that Wiz Defend is now available as part of our FedRAMP-authorized offering, Wiz for Gov. Wiz Defend gives government teams and organizations with FedRAMP requirements a unified way to detect, investigate, and respond to real threats.

Wiz Defend modernizes cloud threat detection by reducing alert fatigue and surfacing root cause for issues more quickly. This provides the necessary context to understand blast radius, threat impact, and how to disrupt the kill chain to minimize impact.

The challenge: Threat detection in the cloud is broken

For many federal teams, cloud SecOps is buried in a growing stream of alert and event noise, with remediation primarily conducted through brute manual effort. The volume of alerts can be staggering, and can quickly overwhelm the capacity of even seasoned security teams. Most tools lack the context to prioritize what really matters, let alone the ability to connect the dots across infrastructure and cloud environments. Analysts are forced to piece together fragmented data, hunting for root cause even while an active incident continues to evolve.

Even when alerts are valid, it’s hard to filter through and know which ones matter most, how disparate alerts may be connected, and who are the correct teams to notify before damage is done.

Today’s threats don’t follow old rules. With the rise of cloud-native tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), attackers can move through your environment without ever touching malware, jumping from a misconfigured workload to a compromised identity, and quietly pivoting across network, identity, application, and data layers. Traditional detection tools were built for endpoints and servers, not ephemeral cloud resources and API-driven infrastructure.

Meanwhile, public sector teams are under pressure to modernize quickly — but with limited resources and a growing cloud skills gap, legacy SecOps tools are holding them back.

Enter Wiz Defend for Gov

Wiz Defend solves this with a smarter, simpler approach to cloud detection and response. Built for the realities of modern cloud infrastructure it helps public sector and public sector adjacent teams detect, investigate, and react with speed and precision.

With the addition of Defend, Wiz for Gov helps cut through the noise, accelerate investigations, and stop active threats in their tracks. Defend enhances Wiz for Gov’s capabilities to correlate signals across your entire environment — cloud control plane, identity, data, workload runtime, network, and more — to provide even more clarity and contextual storylines for fast response.

How Wiz Defend works

Wiz Defend helps –

• Filter through the noise to identify real threats: Defend continuously ingests telemetry and signals across your cloud environment, grouping related events and suppressing false positives. It provides high-fidelity detections, informed through a combination of behavioral analytics, thousands of built-in detections for cloud specific TTPs, real-time threat intelligence, and code-to-cloud context. This forms a clear, prioritized view of active threats, ensuring analysts can quickly view what truly matters.

• Accelerate investigations with visual storylines: Instead of triaging a flood of disjointed alerts, Defend creates a unified attack storyline connecting events across layers, including identity, workload runtime, network, resources, and control plane. Analysts can quickly identify root cause, trace attacker movement, and understand the blast radius of an incident, all from a single view. Visual storylines show the full attack path and root cause, so teams can reduce Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) from hours to minutes.

• End-to-end runtime protection: Wiz for Gov’s eBPF-based Wiz Sensor delivers deep runtime visibility across hosts and containers without requiring privileged access. This visibility, enriched with cloud context, allows Defend to track activity from code to runtime and enables full attack path tracing. Defend provides visibility earlier within the development lifecycle to help minimize the cloud attack surface and allow developers to detect and fix infrastructure drift in production environments. These capabilities allow Defend to connect an exposed secret in code to a real-world identity compromise in production, with the necessary context and details to direct remediation back at the source. This cross-layer correlation ensures precise threat detection, while response policies triggered by the Wiz Sensor allow real-time containment, such as isolating a workload or alerting a SIEM/SOAR system to stop suspicious behavior without slowing down production. This helps to not only shut down the compromise, but prevent the compromise from occurring again in the future.

• Threat detection aligned to MITRE ATT&CK: Defend provides actionable guidance aligned to the MITRE ATT&CK framework so teams can strengthen their detection posture and ensure comprehensive readiness. Analysts can easily query raw data from both the cloud environments and the Wiz runtime sensor in an intuitive interface to answer complex questions about the cloud environment. All raw CSP, IdP, VCS, SaaS, and runtime telemetry is parsed and enriched in a single place, allowing powerful, complex, and precise queries across the different layers of the environment.

Accelerating compliance modernization for the Government

Government cloud systems are among the most targeted in the world, with state-sponsored and criminal actors constantly probing for weaknesses. Rapid threat identification is critical to protect mission-critical systems and data.

Likewise, FedRAMP-authorized cloud service offerings can enhance system monitoring with Wiz Defend’s continuous visibility across cloud infrastructure, identity, data, and workload runtime layers. This helps address several FedRAMP baseline controls including SI-4 (system monitoring) and AU-6 (audit record review, analysis, and reporting). Wiz Defend can help companies seeking to achieve and/or maintain FedRAMP compliance to reduce manual efforts surrounding audit readiness and continuous monitoring requirements. It also helps generate evidence for assessments, investigations, and reporting, simplifying compliance efforts while supporting mission assurance.

Federal agencies are shifting from static, point-in-time risk assessments conducted every few years to dynamic risk evaluation embracing secure software supply chains, continuous monitoring, and active cyber defense. This shift is outlined through the continuous Authorization to Operate, or cATO, model. Wiz for Gov provides a strong foundation for cATO, combining secure-by-design best practices enabled through Wiz Code, full-stack visibility and context with Wiz Cloud, and now real-time threat detection and response with Wiz Defend — empowering security teams to respond quickly while maintaining compliance and auditability.

“Real-time or near real-time data analytics for reporting security events is essential to achieve the level of cybersecurity required to combat today’s cyber threats and operate in contested spaces.” – Department of Defense, Continuous Authorization To Operate (cATO) Memo

Whether you’re a federal agency or a FedRAMP partner, Wiz Defend makes it easier to secure complex cloud environments with limited time and headcount.

Ready to modernize your cloud threat detection?

Wiz is proud to support the public sector with cloud security that’s built for mission-critical environments. With Wiz Defend for Gov, federal teams get the context and coverage they need to detect, investigate, and respond — all in one unified security platform.

Want to see how it works? Contact us to learn more or request access.

Visit Wiz for Government for more information or request a demo today.