As the world is going digital-first, large organizations are increasingly dependent on cloud computing solutions to streamline operations and make them scalable, and more efficient. However, in doing so, their exposure to cyberattacks through cloud migration increases. Cloud platform ease of use increases the risk of data breaches, unauthorized access, stiff regulatory requirements, and data governance. New security challenges are introduced,, stressing the importance of selecting the right cloud security service providers. It’s crucial to pick a company you can trust and rely on.
Cloud security service providers provide strategic control and security of your sensitive data. A good cloud security provider can quickly take care of threats. It handles critical vulnerabilities and assures seamless cloud operations. Relying on a reputable firm can help boost your company’s cyber resilience and total cloud security posture. As global cyber incidents increase, there is also a need for rapid response during catastrophic events. These solutions must defend against multifaceted threats like malware, ransomware, APTs, and misconfigurations. Investments in CSPs will continue through 2024 as companies look for platforms that can deliver AI-powered threat detection, compliance monitoring, and incident response capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud setups.
In this guide, we’ll examine the best cloud security providers in the industry and how to select others.
What is a Cloud Security Provider?
A cloud security provider provides specific answers to data, application, and infrastructure management-related issues in cloud environments. Security evolves and becomes even more intricate as organizations move from on-premise ecosystems toward cloud-based models like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Cloud security providers deal with these complexities; they use a unique mix of technologies and best practices to ensure organizations can safely operate in the cloud without compromising performance or compliance.
They commonly offer data encryption, threat detection, multi-factor authentication, IDS, and advanced firewalls. CSPs ensure the safety of workloads in the cloud and deterrence measures against vulnerabilities in virtual machines, containers, and cloud-native applications. Most of these providers use proactive monitoring to find any misconfigurations exposing sensitive information to unauthorized access. Most of their solutions use AI/ML in real time to detect threats to give autonomous responses to neutralize the risk before it causes damage.
The Need for Cloud Security Providers
With increasingly complex cloud ecosystems, CSPs have emerged as a growing need since organizations continue to advance multi-cloud strategies where workloads are deployed across AWS, Azure, and many more systems. This realization brings a monumental challenge across numerous systems to ensure multi-cloud security, driven by misconfigurations, data exposure, and vulnerabilities within cloud-native apps, which offer avenues to cybercriminals.
Common cyber threats, such as ransomware, malware, social engineering attacks, and data breaches, can pose severe financial and reputational risks. Security can also fall into the wrong hands. Cloud security providers mitigate these concerns by providing holistic security solutions and tools for real-time threat detection, compliance monitoring, and incident response.
For example, SentinelOne’s AI-driven platform provides continuous visibility across cloud services and offers real-time protection against advanced threats. Similarly, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks delivers comprehensive defense mechanisms for cloud-native architectures, ensuring the safety of critical applications and data across hybrid and multi-cloud setups. We will discuss these players more below.
Best Cloud Security Providers in 2024
#1. SentinelOne
SentinelOne features an all-inclusive advanced AI-driven cybersecurity platform and is a leader in global cloud protection. It delivers the best holistic security with its agentless CNAPP and detects misconfigurations across popular services like GCP, AWS, Azure, and more. SentinelOne’s Cloud Threat Intelligence Engine conducts an in-depth analysis for possible misconfigurations across all renowned cloud services. SentinelOne provides continuous visibility into the security posture for new and pre-existing cloud services. It strives to underscore security deficiencies promptly and offers best practices to rectify them, ensuring your cloud environment retains a robust defense line.
Platform at a Glance
- Singularity™ Cloud Security from SentinelOne is the ultimate integrated CNAPP solution for enterprises. It offers features like Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM), External Attack Surface and Management (EASM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Scanning, and Vulnerability Management.
- Singularity™ Identity provides active protection for your cloud identity infrastructure. It responds to in-progress attacks, deceives network adversaries, and offers holistic Active Directory and Entra ID solutions. SentinelOne Singularity™ Platform enables unfettered visibility, industry-leading detection, and autonomous response. It builds the proper foundation for enterprise-wide security.
- Singularity™ Cloud Workload Security offers real-time hybrid cloud workload protection across AWS, Azure, GCP, and your private cloud or data center. It secures cloud servers, VMs, containers, and Kubernetes. You will auto-discover unprotected cloud compute instances and get support for 15 Linux distros, 20 years of Windows servers, and three container runtimes.
- Singularity™ Data Lake centralizes and transforms your data into real-time threat intelligence for rapid investigations. Its AI-driven unified data lake can perform lightning-fast queries, ingest data from any first-party or third-party source using pre-built connectors, and automatically normalize using the OCSF standard—Automate response with built-in alert correlation and custom STAR Rules.
Best Features
- Secret scanning: SentinelOne’s real-time secret scanning can detect over 750+ secret types and cloud credentials. It offers agentless vulnerability assessments and 1-click automated threat remediation.
- Built-in configuration checks: Graph-based visualizations, lateral movement detection, and ready-to-use policies. Pinpoints configuration drifts and applies over 2,000+ built-in checks.
- Multi-cloud compliance: SentinelOne ensures compliance with various standards, such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, CIS Benchmark, and others. It comes with a Cloud Compliance Dashboard and can combat ransomware, malware, zero-days, and fileless attacks.
- Offensive security: SentinelOne helps organizations outsmart attackers with its unique Offensive Security Engine™ and Verified Exploit Paths™. Its patented Storylines technology empowers organizations with deep visibility. Singularity™ RemoteOps Forensics accelerates incident response with unified digital forensics and streamlines investigation workflows.
- Gen AI cybersecurity analyst: Purple AI accelerates SecOps using Generative AI and enhances data privacy and protection. It supports the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to query native and partner data instantly in a normalized view.
Core Problems that SentinelOne Solves:
- SentinelOne protects endpoints such as laptops, desktops, servers, mobile devices, and cloud workloads from all kinds of threats. It combats malware, ransomware, fileless attacks, and advanced persistent threats (APTs).
- It provides instant visibility into entire cloud estates and automates response actions to contain and remediate incidents. It automatically isolates infected endpoints from networks, prevents lateral movements, and minimizes attack surfaces
- SentinelOne automatically detects and prevents threats across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments. Its platform uses advanced AI threat detection to identify both known and unknown threats
- Security teams get actionable threat intelligence, real-time reporting, analytics, and insights. The platform ensures adherence to compliance and regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc.
Take a look at Singularity Cloud Security’s ratings and review counts on peer-review platforms such as Gartner Peer Insights and PeerSpot.
#2. Trend Micro Cloud One™
Trend Micro consolidates cloud security with its AI-powered Trend Vision One™ Platform. It reduces cybersecurity costs, streamlines compliance, and lowers cloud dwell times. It builds a solid AI native foundation, offers custom playbooks, and ensures AI privacy and ethics. You can use its managed services to protect your cloud-native infrastructure.
Features:
- Endpoint security, cloud security, and email security
- Identity security, risk mitigation, and data security
- Eliminates network blind spots
- Augments security teams with 24/7 managed detection, response, and support
- Blocks threats in real-time and can make threat queries
Assess Trend Micro’s cloud security solutions provider’s effectiveness by reading PeerSpot customer reviews.
#3. Tenable Cloud Security
Tenable Cloud Security rapidly exposes and closes priority security gaps caused by cloud misconfigurations. Its all-in-one CNAPP solution can eradicate exposure risks and ensure visibility across multi-cloud environments. You can discover identity and data resources across cloud ecosystems. Tenable’s unified CNAPP can be deployed at scale and allows businesses to monitor the health of their cloud-native applications.
Features:
- Threat protection and data protection
- IaC security, Kubernetes security, and AI security
- Spots unknown threats, prioritizes security issues, and delivers actionable insights
- CSPM monitors risks by continuously assessing cloud settings and detects deviations
- Ensures multi-cloud compliance
You can compare Tealbe Cloud Security with other major CSPs and see how it fares in the industry by reading Gartner reviews.
#4. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks enhances security across AWS environments for proactive and unified defense against cloud risks. It fixes open-source vulnerabilities and exposed secrets and secures development pipelines. You can detect cloud threats in runtime; it traces attack paths to protect hosts, VMs, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless functions against advanced attacks and zero-days.
Features:
- Detects lateral threat movement risks and performs attack path analysis
- Multi-cloud real-time cloud security posture management
- Vulnerability analysis and code to cloud dashboard
- DevSecOps adoption and guided investigations and responses
- Broad industry security and compliance coverage
You can assess Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and check its ratings and reviews on PeerSpot here.
#5. Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender was originally launched as Azure Security Center to offer visibility and threat protection across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. The company evolved to provide advanced threat protection for GCP and AWS workloads.
Features:
- Remediates risks and misconfigurations across multi-cloud and hybrid environments
- Mitigates malware attacks, brute-force attempts, and critical vulnerabilities
- Ensures compliance with regulatory standards like PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and HIPAA
- Integrates with other SIEM and SOAR tools
- Identifies security gaps, reduces attack surfaces, and provides actionable insights
Explore PeerSpot reviews and ratings to learn about Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s standing in the industry as a CSP.
How to Choose the Right Cloud Security Provider?
With so many factors to consider, such as the complexity of your cloud infrastructure, your regulatory requirements, and the kind of threat your organization is vulnerable to, choosing the right cloud security provider can be difficult.
Here are some tips that may guide your selection:
- Compatibility: It should support the kinds of cloud platforms you might be using, such as AWS Azure or Google Cloud.
- Compliance: If your business is in an industry as heavily regulated as finance or healthcare, look for a provider offering complete compliance tools and controls.
- Scalability: If your cloud infrastructure is only starting to grow, your provider should be able to grow with you.
- Support: The CSP should provide managed services all the time. This will help ensure that it will instantly identify any security incident on its system and be able to respond appropriately.
- AI Integration: Offers AI and machine learning for real-time detection of threat activity and automatic incident responses.
Conclusion
Cloud security is no longer a choice; it’s a necessity for doing business in the digital age. Choosing the right cloud security provider is important, especially as cyber threats increase and complexity in the cloud continues to grow. Comprehensive solutions for businesses of any size and industry include providers like SentinelOne, Trend Micro, Tenable, Prisma Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. These cloud security providers focus on threat detection, compliance, and automated responses, so your cloud-based operations are safe, compliant, and resilient against emerging cyber threats.
Faqs
1. What is a cloud security provider?
A cloud security provider is a company specializing in protecting cloud-based data, applications, and infrastructure against various cyber threats.
2. What are the most used techniques by cloud security providers?
Most of them use data encryption, multi-factor authentication, real-time threat detection, and automated incident response.
3. What are the primary responsibilities of cloud security providers?
They secure cloud infrastructure, monitor compliance with standards and regulations, identify cyber threats, counter and counterattack such threats, and protect sensitive data.