Cloud security posture management (CSPM) helps organizations guarantee the protection of modern and complex hybrid computing environments through security compliance and vulnerability management technologies.
Due to the complexity of modern cloud computing environments, it’s a challenge to not only map out but consistently visualize all the components of such an environment.
It’s common to find organizations erroneously assume their cloud hosting providers will take complete responsibility for the security of their computing environments. This mistake tends to contribute to security breaches and the existence of vulnerabilities.
As a result of cloud misconfigurations, cloud breaches are quite common today. CSPM solutions automatically and constantly scan for misconfigurations that may lead to data leaks and security breaches.
Here’s our selection of the top six CSPM tools:
- Wiz: Best overall
- CloudGuard Posture Management: Best for a comprehensive compliance solution
- Lacework: Best for automating cloud security at scale
- F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP): Best for securing dynamic cloud-native infrastructure
- Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution: Best for cloud builders
- BMC Helix Cloud Security: Best for automated security and compliance monitoring
Top CSPM tools comparison
The listed CSPM tools each offer most of the same key features. However, here are some additional features that create a distinction between the tools.
Tool | Data Loss Prevention (DLP) | Data Governance | HIPAA Compliance | Auditing | Cloud Gap Analytics |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Wiz | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
CloudGuard (Dome 9) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Lacework | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP) | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
BMC Helix Cloud Security | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
Jump to:
- Top CSPM tools comparison
- Top CSPM tools
- Key features of CSPM tools
- Benefits of working with CSPM tools
- How do I choose the best CSPM tools for my business?
- Methodology
Wiz: Best overall
Wiz is a cybersecurity company that delivers complete visibility and context in its users’ clouds to enable them to proactively identify, remediate, and avert risks to their businesses.
Although Wiz is a relatively new player in the CSPM market, its cloud security posture management helps organizations monitor their cloud infrastructure security posture by providing industry-leading capabilities to continuously monitor misconfigurations across clouds.
Pricing
Since Wiz doesn’t publicly list its pricing information, Wiz invites users to contact them for pricing information, as well as a comprehensive live or recorded demo.
Features
- Automatic posture management and remediation characterized by built-in rules, OPA-based customization, and real-time detections and remediations.
- Continuous monitoring, custom frameworks, and compliance heatmaps are some of the features of Wiz that enable its users to confidently address compliance requirements.
- Effective network and identity exposure, attack path analysis, and contextual prioritization of misconfigurations to handle various types of misconfigurations.
Pros
- Wiz helps organizations adhere to industry-specific regulatory requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS by identifying compliance gaps and providing remediation suggestions.
- Wiz prioritizes risks based on the severity and potential impact, allowing security teams to focus on the most critical issues.
- Comprehensive visibility of an organization’s multi-cloud infrastructure.
Cons
- Wiz primarily supports major cloud providers, and organizations using smaller or niche cloud providers may not find the same level of support.
- Although Wiz is user-friendly, it might take time for organizations to fully understand and leverage all its features.
CloudGuard Posture Management: Best for a comprehensive compliance solution
As part of the CloudGuard Cloud Native Security Platform, CloudGuard Posture Management is an API-based agentless software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud compliance and orchestration platform that automates governance across multi-cloud assets and services. These services include misconfiguration detection, security posture assessment, and visualization as well as enforcing security best practices and compliance frameworks.
Pricing
CloudGuard offers a free trial period for its software. For more pricing information, you may contact the Check Point Technologies sales team.
Features
- Enables users to enforce gold standard policies across projects, accounts, virtual networks, and regions. Users can visualize security posture and pinpoint, prioritize, and auto-remediate events.
- CloudGuard Posture Management delivers compliance and governance features to automatically ensure users conform to regulatory requirements and security best practices. Through comprehensive reporting, users are updated on security and compliance posture.
- Privileged identity protection allows users to deny access to critical actions based on identity access management (IAM) roles and users. CloudGuard Posture Management constantly analyses and audits IAM users and roles for irregular activity.
Pros
- Users can create custom policies to suit their organization’s unique requirements and compliance standards.
- CloudGuard is designed to scale with the organization’s cloud infrastructure, ensuring seamless protection as the environment grows.
Cons
- Configuration can be complex, and the learning curve for new users is steep.
- Depending on the organization’s size and requirements, CloudGuard Posture Management’s cost might be higher than other CSPM tools.
Lacework: Best for automating cloud security at scale
Lacework is a data-driven cloud security platform that allows users to innovate quickly and safely by automating cloud security at scale. Lacework collects, examines, and correlates an organization’s data across its Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments with precision and simplifies it to a few notable security events.
Through customized security posture, continuous and automated compliance checks, and misconfiguration checks alongside other security capabilities such as automated intrusion detection, security visibility, and one-click investigation, Lacework stands out against its competitors.
Pricing
For a pricing quote, contact Lacework. Also consider signing up to watch their on-demand demo.
Features
- Lacework uses ongoing activity monitoring to execute misconfiguration checks and keep organizations aware of all activity on their cloud platform resources by detecting instances such as new activity in a region, noting changes to policies, roles, and accounts and alerting users of such activities.
- Lacework finds IAM vulnerabilities, checks for logging best practices, monitors critical account activity like unauthorized API calls, and confirms secure network configurations to guarantee users are free of configuration issues.
- Through continuous configuration tracking and automated compliance checks, users can maintain compliance and protection. Regardless of authorization status, Lacework monitors account activity for irregular activity.
Pros
- Gives users the ability to understand when and how their configurations change and avoid blind spots.
- Ability to pair misconfigurations with anomalous activities to improve risk context.
- Improved compliance to unlock opportunities in new segments, industries, and regions.
- Coverage across all hyperscale providers.
Cons
- The UI could be more intuitive.
- For all the automation offered, false positives often require manual work.
F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP): Best for securing dynamic cloud-native infrastructure
Formerly known as Threat Stack, F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP) delivers cloud security and compliance for application infrastructures to help enterprises enjoy the vast capabilities of the cloud through efficient threat detection and proactive risk identification across cloud workloads.
It bridges the gap between development, security, and operations, thereby improving overall organizational efficiency for users by offering full-stack observability. Through AIP, organizations can efficiently discern known risks at scale and speedily detect anomalies across their cloud-native workloads.
Pricing
F5 offers free trials for most of its products but pricing information can only be obtained by reaching out directly.
Features
- Cloud management console monitoring helps users learn their attack surfaces and manage risk across their cloud instances.
- Vulnerability assessment to detect and remediate high-priority vulnerabilities.
- Container security helps expose security risks across containers and Kubernetes.
- Threat intelligence correlation to understand risks external to the enterprise by leveraging data from Distributed Cloud AIP insights.
- Host-based intrusion detection to contextualize events and surface priority alerts.
Pros
- Provides a comprehensive suite of security tools, including WAF, DDoS protection, and API security.
- F5 solutions can integrate with popular cloud platforms and third-party security tools.
- F5 provides access and identity management features to control access to applications.
Cons
- The UI may feel clunky and overwhelming. Additionally, configuring custom rules may be tedious and cumbersome.
- Threat of vendor lock-in as it may be challenging to switch from F5 to another vendor without significant effort and cost.
Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution: Best for cloud builders
Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution is a security services platform that targets cloud builders. It delivers a deep and vast unified cloud security solution that enables users to easily secure cloud infrastructure. The powerful security allows users to leverage the benefits and efficiencies of the cloud to their businesses.
Trend Micro Hybrid supports not only all the major cloud platforms but also solutions that integrate directly into users’ DevOps processes and toolchains.
Pricing
Users may opt for either an annual subscription or a pay-as-you-go approach. To get the most accurate pricing information, it is recommended to contact Trend Micro for a customized quote. You can also check out the pricing of the seven pay-as-you-go offerings from Trend Micro. The software also offers a 30-day free trial period.
Features
- Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud provides simple and flexible cloud security throughout the processes of migration and expansion by automating the discovery and protection of cloud environments as it protects the network layer.
- Trend Micro Cloud One offers application security that’s up to par with modern development technologies and practices to provide instant protection, timely detection, and a guarantee that your cloud services uphold security best practices.
- Trend Micro provides workload security to protect virtual, physical, and cloud workloads and ensure consistent security across different environments.
- Compliance and configuration management to identify misconfigurations and compliance violations and offer recommendations to mitigate risks.
Pros
- Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security provides a complete suite of security features to protect your cloud infrastructure.
- The solution is designed to scale with your cloud environment, allowing you to maintain consistent security as your infrastructure grows.
- Integrates well with various cloud service providers and other security tools, providing a more streamlined security experience.
- Trend Micro has a reputation for providing good customer support and continuous updates to its product offerings.
Cons
- Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud may be cumbersome to configure. It may also lead to high CPU usage when large workloads are involved.
- The wide range of features and integrations may result in a steep learning curve for users new to cloud security.
BMC Helix Cloud Security: Best for automated security and compliance monitoring
Without coding as a requirement, BMC Helix Cloud Security automates cloud configuration security checks and remediation, allowing services such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to have a secure and consistent configuration with an audit trail.
BMC Helix Cloud Security improves governance and reduces risk by embedding compliance and security testing into service delivery and cloud operations.
Pricing
BMC Helix Cloud Security provides an annual subscription model that includes the product plus support and maintenance. The model is based on cloud assets. Specific pricing information is available upon request from the vendor.
Features
- Through automated cloud configuration, BMC Helix Cloud Security automates cloud security posture management for users using Center for Internet Security (CIS) policies for cloud assets.
- The software simplifies the remediation process for users by offering self-driving remediation, automated remediation via an intuitive UI, and custom remediation support.
- Policies such as CIS, GDPR, and PCI are ready to use in BMC Helix Cloud Security. BMC Helix also offers support for custom policies.
Pros
- Comprehensive coverage to offer protection across different cloud environments.
- No coding is required for automated remediation.
- The solution can be integrated with other BMC products for better overall management.
Cons
- Compared to some competitors, BMC Helix Cloud Security may have fewer third-party integrations.
- It may be costlier than its alternatives.
Key features of CSPM tools
Though the core offerings may vary, the most common features of CSPM typically include visibility and monitoring, compliance management, automated remediation, risk assessment, and policy customization.
Visibility
A CSPM tool provides complete visibility into an organization’s cloud infrastructure, including resources, assets, and configurations, making it easier to identify and address potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Continuous monitoring
CSPM tools automatically and continuously monitor cloud environments for security risks, configuration changes, and compliance violations, alerting security teams to any issues in real-time.
Compliance management
A CSPM tool helps organizations maintain compliance with various industry standards, regulations, and best practices by providing prebuilt policies, templates, and reporting capabilities.
Automated remediation
Some CSPM tools offer automated remediation capabilities to quickly fix identified security issues, such as misconfigurations, without manual intervention.
Risk assessment and prioritization
CSPM tools can assess and prioritize risks based on their potential impact, helping organizations to allocate resources and focus on the most critical vulnerabilities.
Customizable policies and rules
A CSPM tool allows organizations to create and enforce custom security policies and rules specific to their unique security requirements, in addition to using built-in policies and rules.
Benefits of working with CSPM tools
There are many benefits of using CSPM tools to simplify and improve your organization’s security posture, including improved visibility and monitoring, proactive risk management, consistent security policies and automated compliance.
Enhanced visibility
CSPM tools enhance visibility for users as they provide a clear, comprehensive view of the organization’s cloud infrastructure, enabling them to identify security risks and manage resources effectively.
Continuous monitoring
These tools offer real-time monitoring of cloud environments, ensuring that potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or policy violations are detected and addressed promptly.
Automated compliance
CSPM tools can automatically map and assess an organization’s cloud environment against industry standards and regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. This streamlines the compliance process and ensures adherence to necessary guidelines.
Proactive risk management
By identifying and addressing risks before they become critical, CSPM tools enable organizations to proactively mitigate potential security incidents before it’s too late.
Consistent security policies
CSPM tools facilitate the consistent application of security policies across different cloud environments and service providers, ensuring best practices are maintained throughout the organization.
How do I choose the best CSPM tool for my business?
Choosing the best CSPM tools for your business is essential to maintain security and compliance and minimize risks in your cloud environment. Here are some considerations to make when selecting a CSPM tool for your business:
Understand your business needs
Analyze the specific requirements and objectives of your organization. Consider factors like industry regulations, the size of your business, the types of data you handle, and your cloud infrastructure.
Define your security and compliance requirements
Identify the security and compliance standards your business must meet, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS. This will help you choose a CSPM tool that supports the necessary regulatory frameworks.
Assess features and capabilities
Look for CSPM tools that offer robust features, such as:
- Continuous monitoring and automated assessments
- Policy enforcement and automated remediation
- Comprehensive reporting and dashboards
- Risk prioritization and management
- Integration with SIEM, SOAR, and other security tools
- Support for multi-cloud and hybrid environments
Pricing and support
Compare pricing models and ensure that the chosen CSPM tool fits within your budget. Also, consider the level of customer support provided by the vendor, including response times and availability of support channels.
Request a demo or trial
Before making a final decision, request a demo or trial of the CSPM tool to evaluate its features and usability in your specific environment.
Methodology
To determine the best CSPM tools available today, we first considered the key features of a top CSPM tool and highlighted the tools that best fit within this scope. Then we assessed tools that fit into four key segments of the market: market leaders, contenders, high performers, and niche.
After that, we evaluated the shortlisted tools on reputable review sites such as G2, extensively compared customer reviews, and examined official product pages, websites, solutions briefs, and datasheets to pare the list down to these six CSPM tools.
Also see
- Get familiar with the ins and outs of cloud automation with What You Need to Know About Cloud Automation: Tools, Benefits, and Use Cases
- Build a strong security foundation with the Top 8 Enterprise Network Security Companies in 2023
- Keep a close eye on any network threats with the 7 Best Network Detection and Response Solutions in 2023