8 Top Cloud Security Solutions

Cloud computing has become a vast market with many sub-sectors, so keeping cloud computing secure is also a broad area with multiple technologies and functions of cloud security solutions. People need to understand the leading cloud security solutions, including various vendor approaches and how to choose the best cloud security products.

Cloud security solutions are often used to help protect enterprise workloads running in private and public cloud services.

There are several types of cloud security solutions that can help organizations reduce risk and improve security. These include:

Cloud Workload Protection Platform. Cloud Workload Protection technology works with cloud computing infrastructure and virtual machines to provide monitoring and threat prevention capabilities.

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). Another category of cloud security solutions is often identified as cloud access security broker (CASB) platforms, which monitor activity from an access perspective and enforce security policies.

SaaS. Cloud computing also offers a wide range of security tools and technologies that use the software as a service (SaaS) model to help protect cloud and on-premises workloads. You can explore the leading SaaS companies to understand the overall SaaS market.

Cloud security solution suites may include capabilities for cloud workloads and cloud access security broker (CASB) technology to help provide a complete set of capabilities to protect cloud access and deployments.

What should enterprises know when choosing cloud security solutions?

Protection capabilities. It is important to identify the workloads that need to be protected and ensure that the cloud security solution provides protection capabilities appropriate for the given workload.

Policy integration. Organizations often have internal directory systems; it is important to ensure that a given cloud security solution can integrate with existing policy systems and provide unified policies.

Multi-cloud coverage. Given that so many companies now use multi-cloud strategies, solutions must be able to work in multi-cloud scenarios and with different types of deployments. Enterprises should avoid vendor lock-in.

Below is an overview of the capabilities of eight of the top cloud security solution providers that can help organizations improve their security posture and reduce risk. The vendors listed below span multiple categories of cloud security solutions, including workload protection and cloud access security brokers (CASBs).

(1) CloudGuard

Check Point's CloudGuard platform has multiple features to help organizations maintain consistent security policies and protect different types of cloud deployments.

A key differentiator for CloudGuard is the platform’s SmartConsole, which provides multi-cloud visibility of security policies and controls within a unified graphical user interface. With CloudGuard, organizations can also protect workloads at the virtual machine level. This enables security policies to migrate as workloads move between on-premises deployments and different cloud environments.

Organizations often highlight ease of deployment as a key benefit of Check Point's CloudGuard platform.

(2) CloudPassage Halo

CloudPassage Halo is a cloud workload security solution that integrates multiple differentiating capabilities into its platform.

At the core of Halo is visibility across different workloads, including cloud computing and servers, to identify insecure configurations and help organizations maintain compliance with different regulatory and security policy requirements. CloudPassage takes an agent-based approach to provide visibility across different workloads and deployments.

In addition to visibility, key differentiators of CloudPassage Halo include the platform's software vulnerability assessment and security configuration assessment capabilities.

(3) Lacework

Lacework provides cloud workload protection for public cloud infrastructure. The Lacework platform continuously monitors changes in cloud computing deployments to detect changes that may indicate misconfiguration or potential attacks.

Alerts are sorted based on criticality and context, which is a differentiator for Lacework with its polygraph capabilities. With Lacework’s polygraph graph, different cloud assets, workloads, APIs, and account roles can be visually represented, providing better context for everything, which is critical to getting the right security context.

Users of the Lacework platform can also benefit from regular reporting that provides insights into best practices and risks to help further improve cloud workload security.

(4) Netskope

Analysts often classify Netskope as a cloud access security broker (CASB), although the company's Security Cloud Platform now integrates a wide range of capabilities beyond just securing cloud access.

Netskope's platform provides cloud access security, advanced threat protection, and data protection. Data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities are particularly powerful because they enable organizations to identify and protect sensitive and personally identifiable information, no matter where it resides in a cloud deployment.

A key differentiator for Netskope is its CloudXD technology, which provides contextual details about activity that enterprises can use to better understand risk as well as overall cloud usage.

(5)Palo Alto Networks RedLock

Palo Alto Networks offers several cloud security solutions in its portfolio that provide different types of capabilities.

Palo Alto Networks acquired RedLock in October 2018, introducing cloud workload protection platform capabilities that provide public security and compliance. RedLock's capabilities are combined with those of Palo Alto's Evident platform to provide cloud security analytics, advanced threat detection, and continuous security and compliance monitoring. Misconfiguration identification and the ability to identify potentially vulnerable host systems are core features of the platform.

One of the key differentiators of the Palo Alto RedLock platform is the ability to conduct threat investigations across cloud workload deployments to help identify and remediate threats. The system also benefits from an artificial intelligence engine that correlates resource configurations, user activity, network traffic, host vulnerabilities, and threat intelligence to create context for cloud workload security.

(6) Symantec Cloud Workload Protection

There are a number of different technologies for cloud security within the broad Symantec cybersecurity portfolio, including Symantec Cloud Workload Protection, which automates discovery of what an organization is doing across multi-cloud deployments.

In addition to cloud visibility, often a blind spot for some organizations, Cloud Workload Protection integrates monitoring for unauthorized changes, file integrity, and user activity. A key differentiator is the platform’s application binary monitoring capability, which identifies potential corruption in application code.

Another powerful key feature is the platform’s ability to help identify misconfigured cloud storage buckets, which could potentially leak company information.

(7) Threat Stack Cloud Security platform

Cloud visibility, monitoring, and alerting are core features of the Threat Stack cloud security platform. However, the real difference of the Threat Stack cloud security platform is that its platform focuses on identifying cloud intrusions and then using different tools to remediate any threats.

Threats can be tracked through a dashboard that provides insight into cloud configurations, potentially vulnerable servers, and the status of alert remediation.

Compliance with different regulatory certification efforts is another key feature of the platform, and compliance rule set templates are designed to make it easier for organizations to get the right configuration and controls for cloud workloads.

(8) Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution

Adding elastic security policies to cloud computing servers when they are deployed is one of the key attributes of Trend Micro's deep security for hybrid cloud.

If a security issue is detected, the Trend Micro Deep Security dashboard provides actionable insights to aid in quick remediation.

One of Deep Security's key strengths is its integration with Trend Micro's extensive threat prevention capabilities, providing additional context for potential threats that organizations need to consider and defend against.

Comparison of Cloud Security Solutions