The dynamic nature of public cloud environments requires security operations teams to adapt and embrace a new approach to securing the cloud. Threat assessment and mitigation are significantly impacted due to ephemeral cloud environments, decentralized management models, and distributed data across multi-cloud deployments. Threat prevention for the cloud needs to be built around the principles of attack surface reduction through segmentation and prevention controls, advanced threat detection measures built around user, network and host activity monitoring and behavioral baselines, and rapid response through automated remediation.