The Top 11 Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Solutions

Wiz is a comprehensive cloud security solution that enables organizations to gain better visibility and context and prioritize risks across their cloud environments. It operates across numerous platforms, including AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, and VMware vSphere. As part of their flagship cloud security platform, Wiz offers comprehensive cloud security posture management capabilities. Wiz continuously detects and remediates cloud misconfigurations, from the time of building to runtime operations, to maintain an effective cloud security posture.

Wiz integrates directly to your cloud environment, providing full visibility so that your team can take swift action on the most critical misconfigurations and proactively enhance your cloud security posture. Wiz offers more than 1,400 cloud misconfiguration rules, continuous CIS and compliance monitoring over 100 frameworks, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning, real-time detection, data-specific CSPM rules, custom OPA-based rules, and automatic remediations.

The Wiz “Attack Path Analysis” feature allows teams to easily map misconfigurations that could lead to lateral movement paths that can compromise high-value assets such as admin identities or important data stores. Utilizing the Wiz Security Graph, teams can prioritize misconfigurations using operational, business, cloud, and data context, helping to reduce alert fatigue.

Wiz also features a solution for automatic posture management and remediation, which includes real-time detection and triggering automatic remediation flows. For meeting compliance requirements, Wiz provides continuous monitoring and auto-assessment over more than 100 built-in compliance frameworks, while its “Compliance Heatmap” offers a bird’s eye view to highlight weak spots across multiple applications and frameworks.

Wiz is a comprehensive, easy-to-use cloud security platform. Alongside cloud security posture management, Wiz supports cloud detection and response, vulnerability management, and cloud workload protection. The solution is trusted by 40% of Fortune 100 companies and is currently used to protect over 5 million cloud workloads.

Aikido Security is a cloud security posture management solution that protects against cloud infrastructure risks across all major cloud providers. Aikido protects against the most commonly exploited cloud vulnerabilities, and automatically checks for misconfigurations and over-permissive user account permissions. The platform can also automate security policy enforcement, and enforces compliance checks for SOC2, ISO270001, CIS, and NIS2. Aikido can be set up in just a few minutes via API integration, with no agents required.

Aikido automatically detects and prioritizes cloud infrastructure risks and vulnerabilities. The platform calculates a severity score of vulnerabilities and containers based on the purpose and risk profile of your cloud, ensuring a secure digital environment. Configuration checks are also mapped directly to compliance controls, highlighting misconfigurations which may lead to non-compliance.

Aikido prioritizes compliance and data security. The platform needs read-only access to check for misconfigurations, with no access required to databases or S3 bucket content.

In addition to cloud posture management, the Aikido platform offers a number of key web application features including vulnerability management (with open source dependency scanning), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning secrets management, static code analysis, infrastructure code scanning, container scanning, surface monitoring, license scanning, and monitoring outdated runtimes.

Aikido ensures that alerts are relevant and timely. The platform offers an automated triage system for prioritizing alerts based on severity, and automatically removes duplicate alerts. In addition, admins can build custom rules for alert prioritization to reduce false positives. Aikido ensures quick and easy integration with existing security tools. It offers support for all major version control providers, cloud providers and languages, making it a versatile solution for software teams.

BMC solves complex IT problems with modular solutions that are used by 86% of the Forbes Global 50. BMC Helix Cloud carries out automated security checks to ensure that your systems are all configured correctly and working as they should. Whilst doing this, BMC ensures there is a clear audit trail for compliance and reporting purposes. The solution works across IaaS and PaaS products and services like AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Expert Insights’ Comments: One of this solution’s main strengths is its automated remediation features that ensure you can protect your accounts without the need for manual reconfiguration or coding. This will ensure that bottlenecks and throttling are avoided, allowing you to use the solution without interruption. As with many CSPM solutions, BMC Helix Cloud streamlines the auditing process through native CIS, PCI DSS, and GDPR policy configuration. We would recommend this solution for medium to large organizations that need a strong and configurable tool.

CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity provider that has developed a range of cloud-native platforms to manage endpoint, identity, and data risks. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is their solution to protect cloud environments. It manages cloud applications, mitigates breaches, protects workloads, and addresses digital security posture. The platform allows SOCs and DevOps teams to visualize, detect, respond, and prevent cloud vulnerabilities, with automated features to reduce workload.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Falcon Cloud Security acts in a similar way to an EDR solution; it monitors network status, detects threats, then proactively enacts remediation to keep your network secure. The CrowdStrike platform provides you with comprehensive and robust security. The interface is easy to navigate, whilst giving you the technical controls to fine-tune the solution. We would recommend CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security for medium to larger organizations that need a comprehensive and strong solution that can protect from a range of diverse cyber threats.

Based in Mountain View, CA, Lacework is a data-driven cloud security application. The platform empowers developers to identify and fix misconfigurations before they are rolled out or hit production. For active cloud environments, Lacework can assess and prioritize the risks that it identifies, thereby ensuring that the most urgent problems are resolved first. The solution can automate the auditing process for established regulatory frameworks, including PCI, HIPAA, NIST, ISO 27001, and SOC 2, amongst others, and also allows you to set your own policies.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Lacework is a reliable solution thanks to its ability to undertake continuous scanning and understand normal, baseline behaviors and practices. Admin are notified of any anomalous behavior, allowing them to investigate further. The intelligent solution adds context to insights and correlates events across the network. This ensures that you have the full picture and can respond to a threat in its entirety, rather than merely addressing its symptoms. We would recommend Lacework for small to medium organizations that need to enforce cloud security policies with a high degree of precision.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is an application protection platform that can be used to unify security policies, as well as identify cyber threats and vulnerabilities. The solution can identify misconfigurations at the code level, thereby making it a valuable solution for DevSecOps teams. Defender for Cloud also addresses your cloud security posture, ensuring that applications and settings are working appropriately. Servers, containers, storage, and databases all come under Microsoft Defender’s coverage.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Defender for Cloud provides a centralized dashboard that makes it easy to manage your policy implementation and to gain visibility into network status. The solution provides organizations with a threat score to illustrate their security posture and monitor the effectiveness of fixes. This makes it much easier to understand, what can be, very complicated and technical scenarios. Defender will also map out the most likely routes of attack, allowing you to sure up security measures before an attack occurs. We would recommend Microsoft Defender for Cloud to medium sized organizations that have already invested in other Microsoft solutions and services.

Oregon-based Orca Security has developed an agentless cloud security platform that identifies, prioritizes, and remediates security and compliance risks across your cloud estate. The platform will quickly integrate with your cloud environment to provide risk coverage across a diverse range of threats. These include misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, identity risks, data security, and API exposure. The solution is data aware, meaning that it can identify PII and ensure that it is correctly protected.

Expert Insights’ Comments: Orca’s platform combines several cloud-related security tools, including vulnerability management, compliance, workload protection, and posture management. Together, these tools allow you to gain visibility into a range of network issues, thereby making resolution easier. By having all these features within a single platform, management and configuration is made easier. The platform has 65 pre-set auditing frameworks and benchmarks, making audits easy to perform. We would recommend Orca Security for small to medium sized organizations looking for a reliable security solution that can give valuable insights into cloud security and posture, and particularly those that would like to automate the protection of sensitive data such as PII and PHI.

Based in San Francisco, PingSafe is a cloud security platform that assesses an attacker’s motives and techniques, to prevent their attack from succeeding. The PingSafe platform is comprised of eight tools that address cloud misconfigurations, compliance monitoring, and vulnerability management, as well as credential leakage and IaC (Infrastructure as Code) scanning. PingSafe carries out real-time monitoring across multi-cloud environments, thereby ensuring that you can remediate issues at the earliest opportunity. The platform is designed to carry out auditing in relation to common compliance frameworks like SOC 2, NIST, ISO 27001, and PCI.

Expert Insights’ Comments: PingSafe ensures that security policies are standardized and enforced across your network and users very effectively. This ensures that there are no gaps in your cybersecurity armor. The solution is managed through a comprehensive, centralized dashboard. Here, you can visualize compliance scores and make changes to policies across multiple cloud environments. We would recommend PingSafe for medium sized organizations that are looking for a solution that can provide actionable intelligence on cloud misconfiguration and vulnerabilities.

Stacklet is a cloud governance platform that empowers organizations to gain network visibility, improve security, and optimize performance. The platform is designed around the open-source project, Cloud Custodian. Stacklet AssetDB assesses your network in real-time to gather data on performance and configuration. The solution supports multiple cloud environments and automatically inspects APIs and SDKs to ensure they are updated. Stacklet is also designed to provide comprehensive reporting and auditing of your network for compliance and regulatory purposes.

Expert Insights’ Comments: With Stacklet AssetDB, you can easily monitor your network against compliance criteria, then perform several remediation actions – from sending targeted notifications, to altering settings, or another preconfigured custom setting. Through this efficient automation, Stacklet makes it straightforward to ensure that your cloud environments are secure. The solution gives admins visibility over a whole network, thereby reducing the time needed to identify issues. We would recommend Stacklet for small to medium organizations that are focused on ensuring their cloud posture is aligned with various regulatory frameworks.

Sweet Security delivers an advanced Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution that provides comprehensive coverage across applications, workloads, and cloud infrastructures. Sweet integrates broad detection and response capabilities into a singular platform, enhancing overall cloud security posture.

Sweet uses sensor technology and API integration to extract and analyze cloud log data, establishing a behavioral baseline to identify anomalies. Its advanced behavioral analytics and LLM engines evaluate deviations, providing an in-depth context for each security incident. This approach enables IT teams to understand the complete narrative of any threat, helping to improve mitigation efforts.

Sweet emphasizes context-rich incident reporting by detailing the origins and paths of each security event. Its vulnerability management feature is particularly notable, prioritizing vulnerabilities using actual runtime data to streamline threat remediation.

One of Sweet’s significant benefits is its ability to reduce tool complexity. By consolidating roles typically performed by separate EDR and API security solutions into one efficient platform, Sweet Security reduces associated costs and enhances IT team efficiency. The platform’s EPPS sensors are minimally invasive, ensuring low resource consumption and maintaining environmental stability.

Sweet is ideally suited for large enterprises with intricate cloud environments. Its multi-layered security approach is also advantageous for mid-market companies developing or refining cloud security strategies. Organizations in sectors handling sensitive data, such as finance, healthcare, and retail, will especially benefit from Sweet’s comprehensive and robust cloud security posture management.

Zscaler is an IT security company that enforces zero-trust principles to grant user access and monitor your systems. Their Cloud Protection solution uses intelligent automation to extend your network security to cover public cloud assets. Within this solution is the Zscaler Workload Posture module, which allows you to detect and remediate misconfigurations, enforce least-privileged access policies, and secure sensitive workloads.

Expert Insights’ Comments: ZScaler’s dashboard makes it easy to implement changes and to understand critical information about the state of your cloud environment. One way that the solution achieves this is through a risk matrix that helps to illustrate the likelihood and severity of risks. As well as identifying technical misconfigurations, the intelligent solution can identify elevated or unnecessary access privileges that could be misused in a cyber-attack. We would recommend Zscaler Cloud Protection for large organizations that need a clear and comprehensive posture management solution.