Highlights:

  • Most cloud security teams don’t have total visibility into the dangers associated with these machines owing to the lack of specific knowledge and tooling.
  • Wiz is a vendor in the cloud security market, which analysts predict will reach a value of USD 97.3 billion in value by 2030.

One of the most challenging problems facing today’s security teams is cloud security. Given that 39% of tech professionals cite cloud computing and cybersecurity as their top skill gaps, many businesses lack the expertise needed to safeguard cloud-based apps and services.

But cloud security provider Wiz revealed today that it is attempting to alleviate these security worries with a new integration for VMware vSphere. The new integration presented at VMworld will help enterprises gain increased visibility over virtual machines and vulnerabilities.

The company believes this connection will make Wiz the first agentless cloud security platform to safeguard on-premises and cloud environments with the capability to identify vulnerabilities across services like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Kubernetes.

Closing the cloud skills void

The announcement comes as more and more businesses struggle to fill skills gaps in the cloud. According to research, 57% of respondents said that roles in cloud security—which includes data center and application security—are the most difficult to fill.

Despite this skills gap, most businesses maintain infrastructure and applications that need to be secured across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments.

Cofounder and Vice President of Product at Wiz, Yinon Costica, said, “These architectural decisions have led to security teams needing multiple siloed tools, processes, and organization structures to protect these environments.”

Costica added, “This is costly and complex for businesses to maintain and leaves them without a holistic visibility or security across their organization. For example, VMware ESXi servers are constantly reaching end-to-life (recent case in point).”

Costica pointed out that to reduce the danger of cyberattacks and “serious business interruptions,” many firms employ these virtual machines to operate crucial applications. As a result, it is important to make sure there are no exploitable vulnerabilities.

The challenge is that most cloud security teams don’t have total visibility into the dangers associated with these machines owing to the lack of specific knowledge and tooling.

Wiz’s new vSphere integration overcomes this by offering more transparency to security cloud security teams over the vulnerabilities of virtual machines, allowing them to monitor their security and compliance posture and ensure that vital applications aren’t exposed to threat actors.

Reviewing the cloud security market 

Wiz is a vendor in the cloud security market, which analysts predict will reach a value of USD 97.3 billion in value by 2030 as more businesses prioritize protecting their cloud environments.

One of Wiz’s main competitors is Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud, a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) with SPM and cloud workload protection (CWP) features that offer insight into abnormalities and threats throughout the cloud.  According to Palo Alto Networks’ most recent earnings report, the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022 will bring in USD 1.6 billion in sales.

Another rival is CrowdStrike, which provides its CNAPP solution to give security teams more insight over cloud assets so they can detect misconfigurations and defend cloud workloads during runtime.

CrowdStrike reported that its overall revenue for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022 was USD 431 million.

Costica claims that Wiz’s agentless methodology sets it apart from these solutions.

Costica said, “Wiz is a fully agentless cloud security solution that not only provides broad visibility into or across any major cloud environment with feature parity across providers but leverages the Wiz Security Graph to map the interconnections between resources and correlate all major risk factors so teams can identify every critical risk.”