Today, attackers no longer need exotic exploits. A forgotten storage bucket, an overprivileged role, or an unpatched container is enough for threat actors to do large-scale damage. In fact, Forrester predicts that by the end of 2025, cybercrime costs will hit $12 trillion.
In response, security budgets are climbing, but that doesn’t make choosing the right cloud security tool any easier. It can feel like the shopping list never ends—auditors demand evidence, engineers crave frictionless pipelines, and executives expect measurable risk reduction. These pressures have given rise to a new generation of platforms promising full-stack protection – without slowing down cloud teams.
This post provides a practical blueprint for judging those claims and selecting technology that truly fits your organization.
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The three pillars of a cloud security platform
An optimal cloud platform acts like a feedback loop where visibility feeds prevention, prevention informs response, and every response sharpens the next round of visibility. This rhythm relies on three pillars:
Secure Cloud Development
Cloud security starts with development. By identifying and resolving risks directly in code and pipelines, teams can prevent issues before they reach production. This includes secret scanning to detect hardcoded credentials, analyzing open-source packages for vulnerabilities, validating infrastructure-as-code templates, and enforcing guardrails that prevent misconfigurations and privilege creep.
The most effective approach integrates these controls into existing developer workflows — through IDE plugins, CI/CD integrations, and policy-as-code enforcement — so engineers can act on security insights without disruption. Mapping cloud risks back to their origin also supports unified vulnerability management by tying runtime exposures to specific lines of code or IaC templates.
Secure Cloud Posture
After deployment, maintaining a strong and adaptive security posture is critical — especially as organizations increasingly build and deploy AI workloads in the cloud. AI security posture management requires deep visibility into the configurations, data flows, service permissions, and cloud resources that support machine learning pipelines and inference services. Misconfigurations, over-permissioned identities, or exposed storage buckets can introduce unique risks when tied to sensitive models or training data.
Cloud posture management connects these elements — from container configurations to identity graphs — to uncover real attack paths. Prioritization based on exploitability, rather than raw severity, helps teams focus on what truly matters, while also ensuring alignment with compliance and governance frameworks.
Secure Runtime
Even the most secure deployments face runtime risk. Environments change rapidly, and new threats can arise from emerging vulnerabilities, zero-day exploits, or identity misuse. Cloud detection and response capabilities are essential for identifying active threats — whether it's unusual container behavior, unauthorized access, or lateral movement across services.
High-fidelity runtime monitoring, especially for container security, enables detection without performance impact. Security teams can investigate incidents with full context, trace issues back to development or posture weaknesses, and take rapid action. With AI-driven environments introducing new layers of complexity, runtime insights help ensure threats are caught early and resolved fast.
Criteria for evaluating cloud security solutions
These eight criteria mirror the order in which a threat actor would navigate your environment, from code to runtime. Look for a platform that handles threats every step of the way.
Secure cloud development
Every feature in this layer should lower the chance of bad code reaching an account. Effective tools…
Read Terraform, Helm, and CloudFormation files
Scan container images before push
Run SCA to uncover outdated libraries
Use secrets-detection engines to stop credentials from landing in source control
Leverage policy gates to compare each pull request with company standards and fail the build when rules break
Cloud Posture Coverage
Here, you need agentless discovery to inventory assets across every major provider and refresh the list whenever an API call adds something new.
Next, with multi-cloud CSPM, you can check that inventory against CIS Benchmarks while CIEM looks for identities that hold excessive power. Also, using DSPM tracks sensitive records and their movement. Together, these capabilities create a living map that shows where risk is growing.
Detection & Response Capabilities
CWPP gathers process events, flow logs trace lateral movement, and threat intelligence provides the much-needed context. An analytics engine joins these streams, judges if an activity can touch valuable data, and triggers playbooks to quarantine workloads, rotate keys, or roll out patches.
Ease of Deployment
To solve deployment friction, a default agentless mode allows for rapid coverage with optional agents for deep kernel telemetry or host isolation when needed, streamlining deployment.
Risk Prioritization Accuracy
Pick a solution that uses a graph or machine learning models to rank issues by potential impact, allowing teams to fix what matters most before chasing low-value alerts.
Engineering Integration
Native hooks for Git, Jenkins, Jira, and ServiceNow can help turn security findings into the same work items engineers already manage, which prevents a new console from becoming a silo.
Compliance Automation
In the best cloud security platforms, prebuilt packs for PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and GDPR run continuously, gather evidence, and export ready-made reports so audit seasons no longer steal sprint time.
Support, TCO, and Roadmap
Transparent pricing and a rapidly evolving roadmap, with support teams who answer within minutes all ensure the platform will still fit as your cloud estate grows.
Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
In this report, Gartner offers insights and recommendations to analyze and evaluate emerging CNAPP offerings.
Top cloud security platforms compared
With the criteria in hand, here’s how the top 7 cloud security solutions compare, ranked by real customer reviews and lifecycle coverage.
1. Wiz
Snapshot: Agentless cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) that delivers full-stack, graph-based visibility across multi-cloud estates
Review scores
G2: 4.7/5 ⭐from 702 reviews
PeerSpot: 4.5/5 ⭐from 22 reviews
Gartner: 4.7/5 ⭐from 225 reviews
Pillar coverage
✅ 🛠 Secure cloud development
✅ 🔒 Secure cloud posture
✅ ⚡ Cloud detection and response
Key strengths
Security Graph that fuses CSPM, CIEM, DSPM, vulnerability data, and network reach into one context layer, eliminating alert noise through toxic combination analysis
API-only onboarding finds every asset in minutes across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI without touching workload performance
Wiz Defend provides real-time threat detection using eBPF-based sensors that trace workload behavior and correlate it with cloud control plane activity to provide complete attack path visibility
Best for…
Organizations seeking rapid, agentless visibility across multiple clouds with graph-level risk context and industry-leading detection and response capabilities—without deployment complexity
2. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security
Snapshot: Extended endpoint security platform with unified agent and agentless cloud protection
Review scores
G2: 4.6/5 ⭐from 71 reviews
PeerSpot: 4.1/5 ⭐from 29 reviews
Gartner: 4.7/5 ⭐from 251 reviews
Pillar coverage
✅ 🛠 Secure cloud development
✅ 🔒 Secure cloud posture
✅ ⚡ Cloud detection and response
Key strengths
Offers CNAPP capabilities, including CSPM, ASPM, and DSPM functions within a single management console
Provides threat detection across endpoints and cloud workloads using shared agent infrastructure
Includes threat intelligence data and managed hunting services for organizations that need external security operations support
Best for…
Hybrid cloud organizations that want to extend endpoint security with a unified response
3. Cortex Cloud (formerly Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud)
Snapshot: Full-stack cloud native security platform with code-to-cloud protection and AI-powered risk prioritization
Review scores
G2: 4.1/5 ⭐from 97 reviews
PeerSpot: 4.2/5 ⭐from 110 reviews
Gartner: 4.5/5 ⭐from 241 reviews
Pillar coverage
✅ 🛠 Secure cloud development
✅ 🔒 Secure cloud posture
✅ ⚡ Cloud detection and response
Key strengths
Provides code-to-cloud coverage with development pipeline integrations
Comprehensive shift-left security with IaC scanning plugins for major IDEs, SCM systems, and CI/CD platforms
Offers compliance automation features supporting common regulatory frameworks and industry standards
Best for…
Enterprises needing full-stack protection with deep compliance capabilities and risk analysis—especially those already invested in network-heavy or complex multi-cloud environments
4. Orca Security
Snapshot: Agentless CNAPP platform using patented SideScanning technology for comprehensive cloud visibility
Review scores
G2: 4.6/5 ⭐from 220 reviews
PeerSpot: 4.8/5 ⭐from 59 reviews
Gartner: 4.6/5 ⭐from 146 reviews
Pillar coverage
✅ 🛠 Secure cloud development
✅ 🔒 Secure cloud posture
➖ ⚡ Cloud detection and response
Key strengths
SideScanning technology provides agentless visibility across running, stopped, and idle workloads without performance impact
Unified platform combining CSPM, CIEM, DSPM, and vulnerability management with contextual risk scoring
Introduced Orca Sensor for limited runtime visibility, though it lacks persistent real-time monitoring found in more mature CWPPs (the platform captures threat intelligence through scheduled snapshots rather than persistent runtime monitoring)
Best for…
Organizations seeking comprehensive agentless coverage with minimal deployment friction, though those requiring real-time cloud security may need supplemental solutions
5. Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Snapshot: Native cloud security platform with deep Azure integration and multi-cloud CSPM capabilities
Review scores
G2: 4.4/5 ⭐from 302 reviews
PeerSpot: 4.0/5 ⭐from 78 reviews
Gartner: 4.5/5 ⭐from 34 reviews
Pillar coverage
✅ 🛠 Secure cloud development
✅ 🔒 Secure cloud posture
➖ ⚡ Cloud detection and response
Key strengths
Provides CSPM and CWPP capabilities with seamless integration across Azure services and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem
Offers agentless vulnerability scanning alongside agent-based workload protection for flexible deployment options
Delivers infrastructure-as-code vulnerability assessment and DevOps configuration monitoring across CI/CD workflows
Best for…
Organizations using the Microsoft ecosystem for unified Azure hybrid security
6. Sysdig Secure
Snapshot: Container and Kubernetes–focused CNAPP platform powered by runtime insights and open-source Falco threat detection
Review scores
G2: 4.8/5 ⭐from 109 reviews
PeerSpot: 4.1/5 ⭐from 10 reviews
Gartner: 4.9/5 ⭐from 203 reviews
Pillar coverage
✅ 🛠 Secure cloud development
✅ 🔒 Secure cloud posture
➖ ⚡ Cloud detection and response
Key strengths
Delivers runtime threat detection using open-source Falco, with both agent-based and agentless scanning methods
Provides comprehensive container lifecycle security from build to runtime with CI/CD pipeline integration
Best for…
Organizations with container-heavy and Kubernetes-native workloads requiring deep runtime visibility and threat detection, particularly those needing specialized cloud-native security expertise
7. Check Point CloudGuard
Snapshot: Comprehensive CNAPP solution combining network security heritage with cloud-native protection across multiple modules
Review scores
G2: 4.5/5 ⭐from 125 reviews
PeerSpot: 4.3/5 ⭐from 152 reviews
Gartner: 4.5/5 ⭐from 268 reviews
Pillar coverage
✅ 🛠 Secure cloud development
✅ 🔒 Secure cloud posture
✅ ⚡ Cloud detection and response
Key strengths
Delivers a complete CNAPP with 52 distinct security engines covering CSPM, CWPP, DSPM, and CIEM modules
Provides advanced threat prevention with industry-leading catch rates, including IPS, anti-bot measures, and threat emulation
To automate policy deployment and scaling, the solution works natively with infrastructure-as-code solutions like Ansible and Terraform
Best for…
Enterprises seeking mature network security capabilities extended into cloud environments, particularly those with existing Check Point infrastructure who require unified policy management across hybrid deployments
Conclusion
The cloud security platforms that succeed today understand that prevention, hardening, and response must work as one continuous loop rather than as separate point solutions. As we’ve seen, each pillar feeds the others, creating a security posture that adapts at the same speed your infrastructure grows. That said, few platforms deliver full coverage without complexity, which is why Wiz stands out from the crowd.
Wiz delivers the complete security loop through a single agentless platform. Only Wiz correlates findings across development, posture, and runtime using a single Security Graph—providing code-to-cloud visibility and eliminating siloed blind spots. With the Security Graph, teams can gain immediate visibility into their entire cloud estate—while seamlessly integrating security checks into existing pipelines and automating response actions that stop threats before they spread. See it for yourself: Request a demo today.
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