If you’re trying to decide which vendor is the right fit for your organization, we feel that Gartner® Peer Insights™ is always a great place to start because it’s a synthesis of reviews and ratings from organizations actually using the solutions. They’ve just released their latest Voice of the Customer for Cloud Security Posture Management Tools, and it’s well worth a look.

Sysdig was recognized as one of only two Strong Performers in this CSPM report, and received the highest overall rating of 5 out of 5 based on 30 reviews as of 31 November 2023. Bear in mind — this recognition directly represents the value our customers gain from using our platform.

How our customers rate us

What does it mean for us to receive the highest overall rating in a report like the Voice of the Customer? In Sysdig’s case, it means we received an overall rating from our customers of 5 out of 5, based on 30 reviews as of 31 November 2023. In fact, Sysdig was the only vendor in the report to get the maximum 5 stars. Our ratings by category were also the highest of any vendor: a 4.9 out of 5 for product capabilities, sales experience, and deployment experience, and 5 out of 5 for support experience. And we were recommended by a whopping 97% of our customers.

Sysdig was placed in the Strong Performer quadrant. Vendors placed in the upper-left “Strong Performer” quadrant of the “Voice of the Customer” graphic meet or exceed the market average for Overall Experience but do not meet the market average for User Interest and Adoption.

Sysdig’s secret sauce: Addressing active cloud risk 

It’s clear that Sysdig’s approach to CSPM is resonating with our customers. But what, exactly, sets our CSPM apart?

Sysdig uses runtime insights to uncover and prioritize active cloud risk and go beyond static risk analysis provided by traditional CSPM solutions. The importance of runtime insights for CSPM is evident in the feedback we received from customers, like in this review: 

I’m genuinely impressed with the level of real-time security posture checks it brings to our cloud infrastructure. The solution has proven to be an invaluable asset in ensuring the safety of our cloud-native application and data.

Gartner Review

Sysdig’s CSPM is also part of a larger CNAPP solution, combining cloud workload protection, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, and detection and response into a single security platform that provides our customers with end-to-end coverage from prevention to defense. In another review, a customer writes: 

My overall experience with Sysdig CNAPP has been overwhelmingly positive. Its comprehensive cloud-native security features, including vulnerability management, offer not detection capabilities but robust protection for our cloud-native services and applications. With Sysdig CNAPP in place, [I] feel more confident in our cloud infrastructure’s security and safety of our critical data.

Gartner Review

This consolidated approach to cloud security, plus our unique runtime insights-based approach to combat active cloud risk, are what make Sysdig stand out.  But if you’d rather hear what makes us different from our customers, here’s just a few more of the reviews we’ve received on Gartner Peer Insights:

Sysdig CSPM provides unmatched insight and fortified security for cloud-native infrastructure with state-of-art technology. Powered by Falco, it offers comprehensive visibility, empowering businesses to monitor and safeguard cloud assets efficiently. From identifying vulnerabilities and misconfiguration to proactive threat detection and compliance, Sysdig CSPM is an indispensable platform for strengthening cloud security. Embrace it for unparalleled protection and confidence in the ever-evolving cloud computing landscape.

Gartner Review

Since implementing Sysdig CSPM, our incident response time has drastically improved, allowing us to mitigate security issues promptly.

Gartner Review

Sysdig CSPM is outstanding for our multi-cloud environment. It strengthens operational efficiency and risk control through monitoring and strong security. Real-time insights aid troubleshooting and integration is seamless.

Gartner Review

The post Customers Rate Sysdig 5 Out of 5 in Gartner® Voice of the Customer for Cloud Security Posture Management Tools appeared first on Sysdig.

The infrastructure of containers is complex and contains multiple attack vectors, and most enterprises don’t have the time or resources to secure all attack vectors for all containers. This is exacerbated by how short-lived most containers are — Sysdig’s latest research has found that 70% of containers exist for less than five minutes.

Essentially, containers are a growing risk for the organizations that use them, and companies need new security measures in place to account for that risk. To that end, analyst firm GigaOm has released a report assessing key container security vendors, so organizations can make an informed decision on which solution is right for them.

“Here’s a small bit of advice: we know most organizations are not currently doing comprehensive container security,” GigaOm writes. “We advise that a solution be chosen and implemented, the sooner the better.”

Want to learn more on how to choose a container security solution — and why Sysdig’s rate of innovation and breadth of features earned us an Outperformer designation and a place in the Leaders circle? Check out the full report from GigaOm, or read on for a summary of the most important points.

The many approaches to container security

To select a container security vendor, you’ll first want to have a clear picture of what your organization needs, and what features may be a higher or lower priority. This will look different for each organization, but there are some broad generalizations that can be made depending on a company’s size. Small-to-medium businesses may want to prioritize ease of use and deployment in container security solutions. By contrast, large enterprises need solutions that focus on flexibility, performance, data services, and scalability.

Your organization’s industry may also determine some of your container security needs. Public sector organizations should look for solutions that excel in compliance and security, as they likely have strict security requirements they must meet. Service providers will want solutions that can support multiple clients, with an emphasis on flexibility, performance, data segregation, and features to improve security and data protection.

Finally, you’ll want to determine what deployment model best fits your organization. There are four primary models used for container security solutions: virtual machine or container image, public cloud image, software as a service, and software. Each has its own pros and cons, as detailed in GigaOm’s report, so make sure you’ve familiarized yourself with your options. 

How to compare container security vendors

In their report, GigaOm assessed each container security solution based on key capabilities (including runtime drift detection and response, registry scanning or monitoring, and network isolation), business evaluation metrics, and ability to integrate emerging technologies.

Based on these criteria, GigaOm created a Radar chart to give an overall picture of how the different solutions compare. 

The GigaOm Radar plots vendors on two axes: Maturity versus Innovation and Feature Play versus Platform Play. The solutions judged to be the highest performers are those that appear closest to the center of the circle. 

As you may notice, Sysdig placed exceptionally well, being named an Outperformer and earning a place in the Leaders circle. We’re proud that our continued leadership in container security has been recognized, and our designation as an Outperformer indicates that we’re truly on the cutting edge of the market.

Sysdig’s runtime insights and data collection sets it apart

How did Sysdig achieve such high results? GigaOm highlights our rate of innovation and wide range of core features, including our ability to help IT prioritize risk more efficiently. Sysdig was one of only two vendors rated as exceptional in all of the evaluation metrics, including flexibility, scalability, cost, and ease of use.

In their in-depth analysis of our container security offering, GigaOm singled out our powerful runtime protection, commenting that “The depth and breadth of runtime information available to help assess risk and protect running workloads is a primary strength of the Sysdig solution. While some monitoring solutions in this analysis simply use the information in log files, Sysdig pulls information from everywhere, including Linux, Windows, and Kubernetes deep within the system in real time.” GigaOm also points out that this same data collection enables our solution to prioritize risks and manage overall system health more effectively than many other vendors.

The benefits of Sysdig’s unique approach to container security can be seen in our work with our customers. For instance, we’ve helped Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) simplify their container security; capture detailed health, risk, and performance data; and save on time and efficiency.

But don’t just take our word for it. Check out the full report to learn more about why Sysdig was one of only a handful of vendors named a Leader and Outperformer for container security.

The post Sysdig Named Leader and Outperformer in GigaOm Radar for Container Security appeared first on Sysdig.

This demand has given rise to the adoption of cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP). Security practitioners are embracing CNAPP to streamline their cloud security programs by consolidating point solutions into a single platform. Operating from a unified user interface, security teams gain comprehensive threat visibility across the organization’s cloud environments and workloads, offering a more effective and efficient approach to preventing, detecting, and responding to cloud security risks.

There are two questions CNAPP adopters must ask themselves:

• How can security teams unlock the full potential of CNAPP to effectively carry out their responsibilities?

• And how can they use CNAPPs to ensure development teams can swiftly build and deliver applications? 

The key lies in giving security practitioners the ability to identify and address real risks promptly. Enter runtime insights — the linchpin CNAPP capability that enables security teams to effectively prioritize the most important and relevant risks in their environment. 

Navigating cloud security complexities

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that risk prioritization is the key for CNAPP practitioners to be successful. But to grasp the importance of runtime insights in delivering this capability, it’s important to understand the cloud security complexities driving the need for better prioritization.

Lack of end-to-end visibility and alert overload

While there are multiple factors driving the shift to CNAPP, one of the most important is the need for visibility into risk across the entire application lifecycle. As risk spreads throughout development, staging, and runtime operations, both security and DevOps teams need deep visibility and insights across the organization’s entire multi-cloud footprint. 

In order to ensure comprehensive visibility, a successful CNAPP must process substantial volumes of data from diverse sources. This encompasses data from system calls, Kubernetes audit logs, cloud logs, identity and access tools such as Okta, and more. Extensive coverage is crucial due to the many potential entry points for attacks, as well as the potential for attackers to move laterally across these domains. However, this analysis can generate a flood of alerts and findings that may or may not represent real risk. Security teams can get overwhelmed by the endless stream of alerts, impeding their ability to identify actual suspicious activity such as remote code execution (RCE), privilege escalation, or lateral movement across cloud workloads.

The backlog of notifications can also delay development, as developers waste time with false positives or remediating low-risk vulnerabilities. Without addressing this, security can quickly become an obstacle that slows the pace of innovation. 

Collectively, these challenges make it critical for CNAPPs to provide deeper insights and prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities based on runtime context. That’s where runtime insights excel, distinguishing the most effective CNAPP solutions from the rest.

Enable rapid risk prioritization with runtime insights

The key for security teams to prioritize the most impactful issues across cloud environments is runtime insights. Runtime insights provide actionable information on the most critical problems in an environment based on the knowledge of what is running right now. This provides a lens into what’s actually happening in deployments, allowing security and development teams to focus on current, exploitable risks. 

Runtime insights are an essential capability for an effective CNAPP solution to eliminate alert fatigue, provide deep visibility, and enable teams to identify real and relevant suspicious activity.

For example, a CNAPP with runtime insights:

• Prioritizes the most critical vulnerabilities to fix by analyzing which packages are in use at runtime. Sysdig research shows that 87% of container images have high or critical vulnerabilities, but only 15% of vulnerabilities are actually tied to loaded packages at runtime.
• Aids in promptly identifying anomalous behavior, suspicious activity, or posture drift that pose a genuine, immediate risk.
• Highlights the excessive permissions to fix first by leveraging runtime access patterns. 
• Guides remediation efforts that ultimately help teams make informed decisions directly where it matters most — at the source of the misconfiguration or vulnerability issue.

Runtime use case: Preventing lateral movement

Let’s explore how a CNAPP with runtime insights can effectively identify and mitigate a lateral movement attack across an organization’s two cloud vendor environments:

Attack path:

1. Entry: The attacker exploits a publicly exposed critical vulnerability.
2. Access: Having gained entry, the attacker now has access to a Kubernetes workload.
3. Privilege escalation: Exploiting failed privilege controls and excessive unused permissions, the attacker escalates privileges, obtaining permissions with admin access.
4. Lateral movement: Using acquired credentials, the attacker navigates across cloud environments, reaching a sensitive Amazon S3 bucket.

How runtime insights mitigate the attack:

• Stop initial access by identifying in-use vulnerabilities:

Challenge: Teams face an overwhelming number of system vulnerabilities.

Solution: Using runtime insights, security teams can pinpoint which vulnerabilities are actively in use, enabling practitioners to prioritize immediate patching of exploitable entry points.

• Track and control excess permissions to block lateral movement:

Challenge: Sorting through permissions can be daunting, leading to excessive and unnecessary access.

Solution: Security teams can leverage runtime insights to differentiate between actively used and excessively assigned permissions so practitioners can effectively ensure they’re applying the principle of least privilege. 

With proper runtime visibility, it is possible for teams to conduct a thorough analysis of permissions usage over an extended period (e.g., 30 to 90 days). If higher-level permissions remain unused during this time, this signals that they are likely unnecessary for regular operations. This proactive visibility equips teams with the knowledge to promptly remove unnecessary permissions, effectively thwarting an attacker’s ability to escalate privileges, and thereby preventing lateral movement.

By leveraging runtime insights, practitioners can significantly enhance their ability to detect, prioritize, and address critical elements of a lateral movement attack, ultimately fortifying the organization’s cloud infrastructure against such security threats.

Wrapping up

Prioritizing CNAPP alerts with runtime insights empowers security practitioners to prevent and respond to cloud security issues with greater efficiency and confidence. As organizations increasingly navigate cloud security complexities, runtime insights provide a decisive advantage by offering comprehensive visibility, enabling rapid risk prioritization, and mitigating alert overload. 

By addressing the challenges of end-to-end visibility and alert fatigue, CNAPPs equipped with runtime insights enable security and development teams to swiftly identify, prioritize, and address critical vulnerabilities, ensuring the organization’s cloud security posture aligns seamlessly with the pace of innovation. 

The post The power of prioritization: Why practitioners need CNAPP with runtime insights appeared first on Sysdig.

However, the increased integration of businesses with cloud environments has transformed the cloud into an alluring target for cybercriminals. As organizations extensively conduct their business operations and store valuable data in the cloud, it becomes a profitable focus for attackers seeking financial gains. In response to the escalating risk of cyber threats, organizations must actively reassess and enhance their approaches to fortify cloud security. 

The unique challenge of cloud attacks

A cloud cyber attack zeroes in on an organization’s chosen cloud service provider – think AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure – employed for storage, computing, or hosting services.

As businesses increasingly embrace cloud services models such as SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, they unwittingly expand their attack surface. Take the adoption of microservices, for instance, which leads to a proliferation of publicly accessible workloads. Additionally, there are containerized applications, developers using packages from third-party libraries, and third-party cloud applications, all of which serve as examples of how the cloud makes things more complex for security teams and introduces many entry points for attacks.

Gaining comprehensive visibility into the many cloud services distributed across an organization’s various providers is not just desirable, it’s an absolute necessity for robust security. However, conventional security tools were not tailored for the array of new environments, services, and resources in the cloud, resulting in significant gaps. The multitude of assets to monitor amplifies these visibility gaps, posing a considerable security risk. 

These challenges raise a crucial question for organizations: What are the best tools for cloud security management? 

Innovations in cloud security solutions

Amid the mounting cyber threats in the cloud, security vendors have adapted their solutions for cloud platforms. The past decade witnessed the emergence of point solutions that address specific aspects of cloud security, such as configuration management, permissions and entitlement management, and threat detection and response. However, with the exacerbation of cloud security risks, organizations have come to recognize the limitations of these baseline security solutions. These tools prove insufficient in meeting the dual needs of prevention – entailing the hardening of posture and addressing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure – and defense, which involves runtime security and threat detection. 

This realization spurred the emergence of Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) as the preferred approach for cloud security. A CNAPP solution consolidates critical features from disparate point products into a singular, streamlined platform, offering a comprehensive approach to identifying and mitigating cloud risks. Encompassing the entire spectrum from build to runtime, CNAPP seamlessly integrates cloud security posture management (CSPM), container security and workload protection, permissions management, and cloud detection and response (CDR).

CNAPP solutions elevate visibility into enterprise workloads and provide enhanced control over security and compliance risks in cloud environments. Proficient in identifying security issues at an early stage, these solutions help organizations save on costs, prevent expensive rework, and ensure that cloud workloads are inherently secure, having been fortified prior to deployment. Equally important, CNAPP also provides full visibility of threats across cloud infrastructure, enabling organizations to proactively prevent live attacks before they cause damage or access sensitive data.

Prioritizing relevance in CNAPP deployments

As organizations embrace CNAPP solutions to consolidate their security arsenal, a crucial challenge surfaces: how to effectively manage and refine the powerful visibility they offer. While CNAPPs seamlessly unify critical security capabilities, without properly prioritizing what’s most relevant to an organization, they can inadvertently generate an overwhelming flood of signals.

The DevSecOps teams, tasked with deciphering this constant stream of alerts, often find themselves inundated and struggling to discern which vulnerabilities and threats pose a genuine and pertinent risk to the organization. As they navigate this wealth of signals, the sheer volume can lead to a drain on resources and team burnout.

So, what’s the way forward? The key lies in leveraging Runtime Insights to enhance an organization’s CNAPP strategy and streamline security operations. By adopting CNAPP solutions that infuse runtime insights into the equation, organizations can not only maintain robust visibility but also focus their efforts on addressing the most critical and imminent threats, ultimately bolstering the efficiency of their security operations and strengthening their security posture.

Elevating security through runtime insights

While it’s impossible to eliminate risk entirely, the critical element in minimizing risk is guiding teams to concentrate on findings with the potential to impact the business. Runtime insights make that possible by providing DevSecOps teams with valuable information for prioritizing findings based on risk level and business context. 

Runtime insights – the knowledge of what’s actively running in an organization’s production environment – are the key for CNAPP solutions to effectively prioritize issues and ensure users don’t experience alert overload. Armed with runtime information, organizations can expertly manage their cloud security posture by focusing their attention where it matters most, including:

• Context about live operations and what services are actually in use
• Visualizations that highlight gaps in environment configuration
• Continuous and real-time detections
• Comprehensive analysis of everything in an organization’s cloud environments (i.e., hosts, containers, cloud services, and serverless functions) and how they are connected

The CNAPP actively analyzes these runtime insights and correlates the activity across them to detect high-priority risks, rather than merely looking at them as isolated findings. This contextual analysis surfaces attacker activity that is leveraging several of these avenues simultaneously to execute an attack.

Together, CNAPP and runtime insights form a powerful combination that empower organizations to effectively distinguish genuine security concerns and address issues at an earlier stage. Once issues are prioritized, DevSecOps can respond to attacks at cloud speed with an understanding of what is happening, the exact location in the cloud where an issue is occurring, and what’s causing the problem.

Essential elements for CNAPP integration

As threat actors escalate their focus on cloud environments, organizations must prioritize selecting a CNAPP solution capable of protecting their applications and data from cyber attacks. When integrating CNAPP into an organization’s existing tech stack, it’s important to consider the following key elements:

• Comprehensive cloud security coverage
  Ensure the CNAPP solution covers all components of the cloud environment and workload, including containers, orchestrators, various virtual machines, and underlying cloud infrastructure. Regardless of the application type, architecture, or configuration, an organization’s CNAPP should provide end-to-end coverage.
• Centralized management
  A streamlined and centralized management system is essential for efficient security operations. Look for a CNAPP that simplifies and consolidates security management processes.
• Risk prioritization
  The integration of runtime insights helps eliminate alert noise and is essential for providing visibility and context into cloud threats, enabling organizations to discern real priorities. Prioritizing risks based on business impact ensures resources are allocated where they are needed most.

Embracing the future of cloud security

The integration of CNAPPs and runtime insights are emerging as a cornerstone of innovation, enabling organizations to effectively navigate and fortify their cloud security posture. This transformative approach goes beyond mere threat response, empowering organizations to proactively anticipate and mitigate potential risks.

As organizations traverse the complexities of the cloud journey, the adoption of a CNAPP with runtime insights becomes a pivotal strategy for securing cloud environments. The narrative of cloud security is undergoing a redefinition, and the emphasis is clear – runtime insights, paired with CNAPP, are the new guide on the journey toward a secure and resilient cloud environment.

The post Cloud Security and the Power of Runtime Insights appeared first on Sysdig.

Cloud-native application platforms (CNAPPs) are one of the most recent categories in this space. But rather than piling another solution on the cloud security technology stack, CNAPPs aim to simplify cloud security by unifying the many disparate point solutions on the market into a single platform.

Luckily, KuppingerCole just released their latest Leadership Compass evaluation on CNAPP, covering the latest trends in the market, the function of a CNAPP, and what to look for when choosing a vendor.

Why do you need a CNAPP?

The fundamentals of cybersecurity haven’t changed. Organizations need to guard themselves against ransomware, denial of service, data breaches, and unplanned downtime, all while complying with laws and regulations. However, the cloud introduces new and different threat vectors, and requires solutions with an approach built for cloud-native environments.

According to analyst firm KuppingerCole, CNAPPs aim to solve the challenges of cloud-native security by “making sure that all these various technologies can operate together, fully automated and at the cloud scale, considering the ephemeral and stateless nature of containers that differentiates them from traditional endpoints.”

CNAPPs can also help reduce friction between development and security teams by streamlining cloud security functions. DevOps teams, whose mission is to innovate as quickly as possible, may often find security measures to be a constant speed bump interrupting their work. Purpose-built cloud security solutions, like a CNAPP, that deliver coverage over a variety of use cases will help development and security teams keep pace with the speed of the cloud — without exposing their organization to unnecessary risk.

The CNAPP vendor landscape

The Leadership Compass evaluated twelve CNAPP vendors, rating and comparing them based on standardized criteria. We’re proud that Sysdig has been named an Overall, Product, and Innovation Leader. Our leadership position speaks to Sysdig’s ability to deliver leading-edge capabilities across the depth and breadth of CNAPP, including cloud security posture management, cloud application security, container security, and more.

Our multi-layered detection capabilities and our open-source approach were both called out as differentiators. Furthermore, KuppingerCole recommends that “The Sysdig Secure platform should be considered by organizations looking for preventive and detective CNAPP capabilities, which also supports the investigative actions required when a security incident occurs.”

Sysdig’s CNAPP helps you secure every second

The bottom line: Sysdig is a leader in the CNAPP space. This ranking was based not only on Sysdig’s capabilities, but our ease of use and deployment, innovation, and overall efficacy.

We recognize that CNAPP must include runtime intelligence and so does KuppingerCole, calling out how our use of runtime insights “helps to identify vulnerabilities that are tied to packages used at runtime to help prioritize the vulnerabilities that matter, as well as to recognize posture drift in real-time as it occurs, rather than at the next scan.”

We’re pleased to see our unique runtime insights-based approach to CNAPP achieve recognition, and we hope you’ll be interested in learning more about the CNAPP market — and what sets Sysdig apart.

Want to learn more?

Sysdig has also been named a Leader and Outperformer in GigaOm’s Cloud Workload Security Radar.

Discover More

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