At BigCommerce, the security tool had become part of the problem. Updates disrupted production. Alerts demanded too much attention. The company went shopping for a replacement and discovered another inconvenience: many candidates delivered their findings in batches. For a team trying to catch an intruder, the interval between those batches was a rather uncomfortable place to live.
- The job: find cloud risks, catch active threats, and help teams respond.
- The difference: use evidence from running software to decide what deserves attention.
- The buyer: security and engineering teams responsible for complicated cloud environments.
Sysdig’s proposition begins in that interval. A security scan can identify a dangerous component or a badly configured account. But a running application supplies another kind of evidence: a process starts, a file changes, a connection opens. Those small events can explain whether a theoretical weakness has become somebody’s very practical opportunity.
01 The clue is in the behavior
Founder Loris Degioanni came to this problem through system visibility. He founded Sysdig in 2013; its open source troubleshooting tool lets people examine Linux activity and capture system calls, the requests programs make to the operating system. Think of those calls as a machine’s working conversation. They reveal behavior that an inventory of installed software cannot.
In 2016, Sysdig created and open sourced Falco. Its rules examine events for suspicious activity, including unexpected behavior inside containers. The project entered the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2018 and graduated in February 2024 after technical scrutiny and a third-party security audit. Maintainers came from organizations beyond Sysdig. That matters: the detection foundation belongs to an ecosystem with participants who have their own interests.
The commercial opportunity sits above that foundation. A company can use Falco without buying Sysdig. Paying customers buy the surrounding platform, context, integrations, and support that turn raw detections into something a security team can operate. Open source makes the engine accessible; operating it across an enterprise is a separate job.
02 A long list meets a short clock
Sysdig Secure is a cloud-native application protection platform, usually shortened to CNAPP. Behind the uninviting abbreviation is a sensible purchasing idea: bring several cloud-security jobs together. Secure covers vulnerabilities, configuration mistakes, excessive permissions, compliance, and active threats across cloud services and workloads. Its runtime evidence helps teams prioritize vulnerabilities in software that is actually being used.
That is a useful distinction when the patch queue is longer than the working week. A vulnerability’s severity matters, but so do exposure and behavior. Evidence about use gives an engineer another basis for deciding what to fix first. It does not grant permanent immunity to everything further down the list. Software changes, and so does its opportunity to cause trouble.
Three handoffs. One very impatient adversary.
Sysdig made urgency explicit with its 555 Benchmark: five seconds to detect, five minutes to triage, five minutes to respond. Introduced in 2023, it is an operating target. Its useful trick is separating three delays that buyers might otherwise collapse into one promise of speed. Finding a threat quickly achieves little if nobody understands the alert or has permission to act.
BigCommerce’s selection came down to two vendors before it deployed Sysdig. Its published customer story reports detection in two seconds and more than 80% less vulnerability noise. Jordan Bodily, its senior infrastructure security engineer, supplies the useful buying criterion: “Correlation and context is everything.” Those are results from one vendor-published account, rather than a forecast for every deployment.
“Correlation and context is everything.”
Jordan Bodily / BigCommerce
03 What the subscription buys
Sysdig sells to enterprise security teams, platform engineers, and people responsible for keeping cloud applications available. Public customer stories range from payments company Worldpay to SAP Concur. Partior, a settlement platform, reports a week saved each month and 57% less alert noise with Sysdig Sage. Again, those are customer-reported outcomes; the attraction is the work removed from the calendar.
There is also Sysdig Monitor, with container and Kubernetes monitoring, managed Prometheus, troubleshooting, and cost information. Partnerships widen distribution and deployment options. IBM Cloud offers workload protection and monitoring powered by Sysdig; integrations also cover AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
The bill depends on the environment. Secure licensing uses hosts, with compute instances for posture management; cloud-log detection uses event volume. Monitor supports host and time-series licensing. Buyers request a quote. Budgeting therefore means counting the resources and telemetry being covered, then allowing for deployment and the staff who will own the response.
Sysdig calls its employees Sysdiggers. Its stated values are customer care, trust in colleagues, and digging deeper. Those slogans are easy to print. For a buyer, the practical test is whether support can explain an unfamiliar event and help the team act on it. That makes the relationship with the vendor part of the product evaluation.
The company financed its expansion with substantial venture backing. Its December 2021 Series G raised $350 million, led by Permira’s growth fund, at a $2.5 billion valuation. The announcement put cumulative funding at $744 million. That valuation describes a financing in 2021, rather than today’s price tag.
04 The dashboard becomes optional
In May 2026, Sysdig introduced headless cloud security, bringing its intelligence into AI coding-agent workflows through interfaces including APIs and MCP services. June brought a new CEO, former Barracuda chief Hatem Naguib. August brought Secure AI, combining agentic workflows, headless operation, and the assistant previously called Sage. The intended shift is from manually navigating findings to directing investigations.
Sysdig faces alternatives including Wiz, Aqua, and Palo Alto Networks’ cloud-security products. Runtime protection also appears in rivals’ offerings; Sysdig’s heritage does not confer exclusivity. A useful evaluation must test the actual workload, integrations, detection quality, and response process. A platform’s family tree cannot answer those questions.
There are deployment conditions to settle, too. Deep workload visibility depends on collecting the relevant events. An environment that cannot accommodate the required instrumentation needs a careful coverage check. Automated response also needs agreed permissions and limits. A detection tool cannot decide an organization’s appetite for interrupting a production service.
The portable lesson is pleasingly concrete. Run a controlled incident through your own environment. Time detection, understanding, and authorized action separately. If telemetry cannot reach the platform, or nobody owns the last handoff, the clock will expose it. Sysdig’s argument earns its keep when those little machine events become a decision somebody can make in time.