The Top 10 Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) Platforms

Wiz is a cloud security platform that offers a comprehensive cloud workload protection, ranging from proactive preventative measures to real-time threat detection and response. Wiz offers agentless full-stack visibility into a cloud environment, with automated, forensic scanning for vulnerabilities, secrets, malware, and misconfigurations across a variety of cloud workloads, including virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. Wiz also provides solutions for cloud-native application protection, cloud detection and response, cloud security posture management, and more.

Wiz monitors internal workloads in real-time, enabling teams to quickly and accurately respond to threats and malicious behaviors. The platform holistically integrates the security process into the software development life cycle, enabling early detection and remediation of workload issues well before they can reach production. From a single console, admins can discover all running workloads, analyze cloud workloads and configuration layers, and access a timely catalog of vulnerabilities.

Wiz identifies and prioritizes vulnerabilities, providing detailed contextual information and clear prioritization of risks. By correlating vulnerabilities with different contextual variables, teams can focus on the vulnerabilities that most need attention, remediate critical issues faster, and more effectively prevent data compromise.

Wiz provides deeper, context-driven assessments to improve priority setting and risk management. It facilitates the visualization and understanding of interconnections between different technologies and potential breach pathways in your cloud environment. Taking a holistic view of both your cloud environment and the wider business context, Wiz’s platform is able to analyze and understand the unique vulnerabilities of your business’s security posture. This informs decisions on exploitable vulnerabilities, access points, and business impact risks.

Wiz ensures regulatory compliance with over 35 built-in and custom frameworks and high-level compliance heatmaps. Designed to integrate seamlessly with platforms including AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, VMware vSphere, Kubernetes, and Red Hat Openshift, Wiz offers a comprehensive cloud security platform and a reliable solution for securing containerized environments. Wiz protects over 5 million cloud workloads, and over 40% of the Fortune 100.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation specializes in microsegmentation, facilitating the enforcement of Zero Trust principles within organizational networks. This system stops potential lateral movement by offering visuals of activities in IT environments, employing exact microsegmentation policies, and quickly identifying potential security breaches. Applicable across data centers, multicloud platforms, and various endpoints, it offers a comprehensive view and control over networks without the need for infrastructure-based segmentation approaches.

The technology underlying Akamai Guardicore Segmentation accumulates detailed data about an organization’s IT architecture, utilizing a blend of agent-based sensors, data collectors, cloud flow logs, and other integrations. This collated data is then processed and contextualized through an automated labeling system that integrates with existing databases, resulting in a dynamic, detailed map of the IT infrastructure. This map presents activity at a user and process level, either in real-time or from historical data.

Leveraging AI-driven policy procedures, Akamai simplifies the formulation of segmentation policies. Policies can be devised or modified without intricate changes to the network, ensuring uninterrupted operations. These are adaptable regardless of the workload’s location, whether on-site or in cloud settings. Akamai’s segmentation toolset is further enhanced by advanced threat defense mechanisms, breach detection tools, and threat hunting services facilitated by Akamai Threat Labs.

Check Point CloudGuard is a cloud-native security platform designed to offer protection across various applications, workloads, and networks. It primarily aims to automate security measures, manage security postures, and prevent advanced threats in the cloud environment.

The platform encompasses multiple facets of cloud security, including Cloud Workload Protection, which focuses on vulnerability assessments and runtime protection, particularly for modern workloads like serverless functions and containers. Check Point Cloud Network Security provides threat prevention through a virtual gateway, adaptable to multi-cloud and on-premises environments. Check Point Cloud Security Posture Management emphasizes the governance of multi-cloud assets, aiding in visualizing security postures, detecting misconfigurations, and ensuring compliance with over 50 frameworks.

Supporting a broad spectrum of cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more, CloudGuard consolidates these features into a unified platform, providing centralized visualization, alerting, and auto-remediation capabilities.

Endpoint security leader CrowdStrike Falcon provides cloud workload protection platform capabilities designed to provide breach protection to various cloud workloads, encompassing virtualized units and containers across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

The platform’s main CWP features include runtime protection, which leverages current technologies to defend against both known and unknown malware, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) that facilitates continuous visibility for threat hunting and forensic exploration in cloud workloads. This visibility extends to differentiating activities within a container and on a host, even in transient or decommissioned workloads.

Another key characteristic is its adaptability; Falcon is built to accommodate the dynamic scalability of containers, ensuring efficient protection without compromising performance. Additionally, Falcon’s design emphasizes ease of use, with a single platform covering all cloud workloads irrespective of their location, supported by a central console for overarching visibility. The platform is further informed by threat research and insights from its professional services teams.

Illumio Core is a Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS) solution designed to enhance security across cloud and data center workloads. Its primary function is to restrict breaches within different computing environments. The product grants real-time insights into the connections between workloads, creating optimal segmentation policies from observed traffic flows and implementing these policies directly at the host level.

Illumio Core can segment at significant scales without compromising network performance. It offers visibility into traffic across various types of workloads, including containers, IoT, and virtual machines, centralized within a single console. It prevents lateral movement of breaches, ensuring that connections which are unnecessary are blocked without the need for intricate firewall rules or direct network adjustments. This approach is complemented by an application dependency map, aiding in visualizing, and organizing workload traffic. This visualization facilitates teamwork on policy designs and allows organizations to pinpoint vulnerabilities by integrating data from vulnerability scanning tools.

Illumio Core can be deployed across a vast range of environments, from smaller settings to ones with hundreds of thousands of workloads. Its policies, rooted in observed workload and protocol communications, are designed for quick application and adaptability.

Orca Security is a cloud security platform specializing in agentless security solutions. Orca offers an innovative, agentless cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) that provides extensive visibility into various cloud components such as VMs, serverless functions, containers, and Kubernetes applications.

A distinguishing feature of Orca is its ability to achieve full deployment in a matter of minutes, offering in-depth insight into risks at every level of the cloud, from configurations to workloads. The system collects data directly from cloud configurations and the workload’s runtime block storage out-of-band. The platform’s unified data model consolidates information from the workload and cloud configuration metadata.

Orca provides a robust inventory system that references over 20 vulnerability data sources to pinpoint and prioritize potential threats across the cloud. This inventory encompasses details about OS packages, applications, and libraries. Orca assesses the context of cloud assets to prioritize vulnerabilities effectively. The platform is also adept at scanning for sensitive data, including PII and healthcare information, and employs multiple malware detection techniques ranging from signature-based scanning to dynamic and heuristic file analyses.

Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud is a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). The platform offers a range of protection capabilities, including securing applications from their code stage all the way to cloud deployment, covering hosts, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless functions. Prisma Cloud integrates with the entire application lifecycle, offering both agent-based and agentless security options.

Prisma Cloud offers a comprehensive Cloud Workload Protection component, which provides security for hosts, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless deployments. It combines runtime protection with vulnerability management, compliance, and Web Application and API Security, ensuring comprehensive security for cloud-native workloads from the build stage to deployment and run.

The platform provides unified protection for diverse cloud-native architectures. Prisma Cloud integrates cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) capabilities and Web App and API Security (WAAS) across the application lifecycle. This integration facilitates the inclusion of vulnerability management and compliance in continuous integration and delivery workflows and allows continuous monitoring of container registries and serverless repositories. The platform also offers specialized security measures for hosts, containers, serverless functions, and web applications and APIs, ensuring broad coverage for various cloud deployment needs.

Endpoint protection leader SentinelOne’s Singularity Cloud Workload Protection solutions provides protection for cloud workloads. It focuses on runtime detection and response for cloud virtual machines (VMs), containers, and Kubernetes clusters, aiming for comprehensive visibility and security across multiple platforms.

Key features of the product include real-time detection and response for cloud instances on platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. SentinelOne offers a unified cloud management console for all cloud infrastructures and user endpoints, incorporating cloud metadata into its functionalities. SentinelOne’s Hybrid Cloud Workload Protection blocks and quarantines threats like malware, crypto miners, and ransomware across cloud instances, containers, and Kubernetes clusters.

SentinelOne provides enhanced visibility, stability, and efficiency. It also offers features like Forensic Visibility and Response, with EDR capabilities enriched by cloud metadata, and an automated storyline attack visualization mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. The platform offers efficiency and scalability tailored to DevOps needs, including support for multiple Linux distributions and Windows servers.

Sophos Cloud Workload Protection protects cloud infrastructure and data. The solution provides runtime threat detection and investigations for cloud environments, data centers, hosts, and containers. With this platform, organizations can detect security and compliance risks, monitor anomalous activity, and manage overprivileged IAM access throughout the development-to-production cycle. The solution is available both as an agent or API for integration into security operations, IT, and DevOps systems.

Key features include extended detection and response (XDR) which gives full visibility into host and container workloads, highlighting malware, exploits, and unusual behaviors. This also encompasses cloud-native behavioral and exploit runtime detections for identifying specific threats such as container escapes and kernel exploits.

Sophos facilitates threat investigations by prioritizing high-risk incidents and consolidating event data. Integrated Live Response provides a secure command line terminal for remediation purposes. Sophos offers lightweight Linux and Windows host agents managed via the Sophos Central management console. The platform aligns with DevSecOps workflows, aiming for minimal disruptions and optimal security.

Trend Micro’s Deep Security software offers an integrated security protection for physical, virtual, multi-cloud, and container environments. With its singular agent and platform, the software simplifies security management across these varied landscapes. It delivers runtime protection for containers and provides advanced protection for both physical and virtual servers, with features like automatic policy management.

The software’s protective capabilities are further bolstered by insights from Trend Micro’s 15 global research centers and a network of 450 researchers, who constantly analyze and combat emerging threats. Users also benefit from a suite of advanced security controls, including an intrusion prevention system, machine learning, and application control, designed to detect and block real-time threats while ensuring optimal performance.

Deep Security integrates with major cloud vendors, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, enabling consistent security across multi-cloud environments. Complementing its core security features, the software’s rich API set supports automation, and its comprehensive toolset helps organizations easily demonstrate compliance with regulatory standards like GDPR, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.