It was a routine day for Andres Freund, a software engineer at Microsoft, when he found a vulnerability in a software while running a maintenance process. Little did the 38-year-old know that he’d soon be seen as a hero among cybersecurity enthusiasts. The software where he found the anomaly was a part of the Linux OS used worldwide, and the vulnerability was a major backdoor for highly malicious cyberattacks. But not everyone is as lucky as Microsoft.
Companies cannot always rely on vigilant engineers like Freund to look for security anomalies. Especially in the modern digital landscape, where every software solution or platform is backed by several constituent digital entities that hold infrastructure, data, communication channels, and so on, security auditing is a major necessity. Security auditing tools seem to be one of the more sustainable answers to the rising cyber threats across the world. They offer better security monitoring, misconfiguration alerts, and potential data breach flags to help security teams protect their digital ecosystems.
In this blog, we therefore explore what exactly a security audit is, why security audit tools are needed, and the most reliable names in the security audit tools market.
What Is a Cybersecurity Audit?
Cybersecurity audit is the process of running different types of test scans, along with consistent monitoring operations, to collect data regarding the security of a digital asset. These audits can range from vulnerability scanning (where the tools look for specific security gaps), to infrastructure monitoring (where general data from monitoring logs is used to extract security insights) and penetration testing (where real-world attacks are simulated to test the security response). The ultimate goal is to have better visibility into the security posture of a digital landscape and to ensure a proactive response to potential threats.
Need for a Security Audit Tools
As discussed above, companies cannot rely on manual vigilance to constantly monitor the entire ecosystem of cloud environments, APIs, applications, devices, and more. A recent survey suggests that out of the 94% of cloud customers who faced cyber threats throughout 2023, more than 60% were compromised. Therefore, security teams need more sophisticated means to ensure a proactive and mindful security stance.
Security audit tools can offer this sophistication thanks to their scalability, automation features, and integration with the latest technologies. These vulnerability management, penetration testing, or infra-monitoring tools, among others, can ensure a continuous lookout for any security misbehavior.
Security Audit Tools Landscape for 2025
For 2025, security audit tools would need smarter security audit tools that can use technologies like AI and data analytics for their purpose rather than falling short against their attacks. Below are some of the most trusted tools that can make that happen.
1. SentinelOne Agentless CNAPP and Singularity Vulnerability Management
SentinelOne offers two different solutions for security audits that can collectively be used to ensure 360-degree protection against cyberattacks. The AI-powered cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) integrated with Singularity™ Cloud Security comes with advanced threat intelligence, unified security analytics, and real-time responses against potential security incidents.
At the same time, Singularity™ Vulnerability Management offers features to help security teams identify blind spots from a security point of view, prioritize security risks, and ensure real-time visibility into critical and at-risk assets. Together, the two platforms can help organizations have an accurate picture of their security stance and guide them with mindful security strategies.
Platform at a glance
The CNAPP features offered by Singularity™ Cloud Security brings hyperautomation and AI into security auditing. The platform offers modules for cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud detection and response (CDR), and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), among others, to help with critical security data like misconfiguration, overused permissions, network telemetry, and more. The platform offers agentless scanning powered by AI for proactive threat detection and real-time protection.
Singularity™ Vulnerability Management further adds to these capabilities by offering runtime visibility into workloads, easy identification of blind spots, and isolation of suspicious assets.
Features:
- AI-powered insights: The two platforms collectively offer deeper visibility across the digital ecosystem with contextualized security scanning and vulnerability assessment. Be it containers, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), configurations, or more, the AI-powered platforms ensure that security teams have all the information about the security posture they need for real-time protection measures.
- Hyperautomation: Pre-built detection libraries and agentless vulnerability scanning features offered by these SentinelOne solutions bring hyperautomation capabilities into security auditing. Security teams can identify hidden gaps like misconfigurations, obsolete dependencies, and even customized security data with these automated features.
- Real-time protection: SentinelOne offers both CNAPP and vulnerability management solutions that help with runtime visibility into workloads, including active devices, containers, IaC code, etc., to ensure proactive protection measures and real time response against any threat. This ensures that the security audit data can be used in real time to protect the digital ecosystem.
- Vulnerability prioritization: With contextualized security data, the platforms make it easy for the security teams to prioritize vulnerabilities for mitigation. The AI features help assess the likelihood of any exploitation of digital assets, and 1,000+ pre-built rules ensure real time protection as per the set priorities.
Core problems that SentinelOne eliminates
- Asset discovery
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- Identifying unknown deployments for security audit
- Clear visibility into security blind spots
- AI features for asset discovery
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- Misconfigurations
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- Easy detection of misconfigurations with built-in scans
- Numerous checks to ensure regulatory compliance
- Multiple configuration checks before deployment
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- Risk management
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- Early scans for security risks
- 1,000+ pre-saved templates for threat detection
- Secrets management and protection features
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- Real-time protection
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- Quick response on security audit data
- Runtime visibility for risk identification
- High-alerts accuracy for potential security threats
Testimonials
Amit Dhawan, CISO and Data Protection Officer at Quantiphi, has this to say about SentinelOne’s security assurance:
“Endpoint security [is a] focus area for us. AI and Generative AI are making [security] more challenging and exciting. The features that got me interested in SentinelOne are policy management, asset management, forensics, one-click rollback, and the use of AI and ML. The major change the SentinelOne brings is the assurance that things are working fine.”
Know more about the reviews and ratings on popular spaces like Gartner Peer Insights and Peerspot.
2. Astra Security
Astra Security helps simulate real-world attacks to identify, prioritize, and mitigate any security vulnerabilities. The tools also offer features to audit compliance management for our digital offerings and offer actionable insights for adhering to standards like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and more.
Features:
- Automated assessment: Astra uses automated tools to identify and analyze vulnerabilities.
- Compliance-driven: The tools help generate compliance reports to help the security teams with actionable insights regarding any necessary patches or security enhancements.
- Consistent auditing: Astra also ensures consistent auditing by offering regression testing and re-scans to validate fixes.
- Centralized dashboard: With a simplified dashboard the tool helps security teams be aware of all necessary auditing workflows, compliance tasks, and testing outcomes.
Learn how Astra can help with your security audits by checking out its ratings and reviews on GetApp and G2.
3. Tenable Nessus
Tenable Nessus offers multiple vulnerability management features that can help security teams with security auditing. It helps contextualize the vulnerability for better insights into their impact and potential threats. The tools also help scan security risks for cloud environments and remote workforces.
Features:
- Asset discovery: Any known and unknown assets across the digital ecosystems that might fall prey to malicious activities can be listed and audited by the tool automatically and continuously.
- Contextualized vulnerabilities: The tool uses its audit data to contextualize security risks and equip the security admins with informed decision-making.
- Risk-based prioritization: The tools offer threat intelligence to help prioritize high-risk security flaws and put them up for immediate remediation.
- Proactive risk mitigation: The tool offers automated operations when it comes to risk mitigation. Working on actionable insights, Astra helps close any security gaps proactively.
Check out what users have to say about the performance of Tenable Nessus on popular spaces like Peerspot.
4. Qualys
Qualys offers a vulnerability management, detection, and response tool to help security auditors identify, assess, and remediate vulnerabilities across their digital landscape. Qualys VMDR can be configured for continuous threat detection to ensure a prioritized response against security risks. The tool offers automation capabilities to ensure contextualized security workflows against emerging threats and potential compliance failures.
Features:
- Asset discovery: Qualys VMDR can help identify and categorize assets across various environments, including cloud and IoT, for proactive security response.
- Misconfiguration detection: The tools can help detect misconfigurations for device handling, IaC codes, APIs and more to avoid any security or compliance issues.
- Remediation: It helps with pre-built automated patching and resolution of any detected vulnerabilities to accelerate the remediation process.
- Deeper visibility: The tool also offers actionable insights based on security data collected from channels across the environments for informed decision-making.
To know how Qualys fairs in the market check out its reviews and ratings on platforms like Peerspot.
5. Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management
Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management helps security teams gain better visibility into their digital ecosystems and extract contextualized security insights. The solution is aimed at supporting a variety of operating systems to help businesses with flexible security audit processes. It also helps evaluate hardware and firmware for any security vulnerabilities and helps with remediation in real time.
Features:
- Vigilant monitoring: Microsoft Defender can help maintain consistent monitoring of various assets to eliminate any security ignorance across the digital landscape.
- Threat analytics: The tool has integrated features for threat intelligence to help security auditors with detailed timelines that can help predict potential breaches and prioritize security measures accordingly.
- Contextualized security: The tool also helps with risk-based prioritization of vulnerabilities to ensure that critical assets get stronger protection measures when required.
- Response tracking: It also tracks remediation responses to help security admins verify their efficacy and respond accordingly in real-time.
You can get a better idea about the reviews and ratings on Microsoft Defender by visitng popular spaces like Peerspot.
6. Nagios
Nagios offers infrastructure monitoring capabilities to help organizations gain security-oriented insights. The tool helps monitor networking devices, log data, and traffic patterns to uncover any security vulnerabilities across your cloud environments. Nagios also offers centralized dashboards to help security teams proactively address any security risks in the infrastructures.
Features:
- Security insights: Nagios can help analyze logs to identify any unusual patterns from a security point of view, like unfamiliar access patterns or any misconfigurations.
- Traffic monitoring: The tool also helps analyze network traffic to detect anomalous behavior, such as a sudden increase or decrease in traffic.
- Smart alerting: Nagios provides alert mechanisms that can help security admins proactively identify possible vulnerabilities or risks.
- Capacity planning: The tool helps with security-related audits as a part of its infra-monitoring offerings, where usage trends can be predicted and any security-related downtimes can be avoided.
Know more about the reviews and ratings on Nagios on popular spaces like Gartner Peer Insights.
7. Netwrix
Netwrix offers an auditor tool built to centralize cloud monitoring. The tool can help with compliance management and security checks across cloud systems, including potential threat detection, risk management, and vulnerability flagging. The tool also offers necessary features for strengthening security postures and accelerating security response.
Features:
- Centralized auditing: Netwrix Auditor is essentially a cloud auditing tool. Therefore, its features are primarily aimed at helping monitor various cloud workloads for irregularities, including security risks.
- Data security: The tool can help monitor any access activities on critical data that can offer actionable insights about potential data threats. Using least-privilege configurations, the Netwrix can also help flag any unusual access requests.
- Compliance management: It also helps generate clear, actionable reports about configuration changes around critical assets and workloads. This helps alert the security teams for any potential compliance failure.
- Reducing attack surface: The insights offered by the tool can help assess any security gaps or unwanted access configurations to ensure minimal to no attack surface for the ecosystem.
Evaluate Netwrix’s strengths according to users experience on Gartner Peer Insights and PeerSpot.
8. Greenbone
Greenbone is a vulnerability assessment tool that can help security teams identify and mitigate security risks. The tool can also help organizations reduce the attack surface of their digital offerings, including their on-premise data centers, virtual machines, and cloud-native applications.
Features:
- Vulnerability detection: Greenbone has a large database of pre-saved scans and tests that can help identify security vulnerabilities in a digital ecosystem.
- Security coverage: The tool helps organizations ensure a strong security posture with its customized vulnerability assessment features.
- Security reporting: The tool also helps generate detailed reports to help with contextualized security and prioritized remediation.
- Penetration testing: Greenbone also offers pen testing features to help security teams more actionable insights regarding their security posture against real-world threats.
9. Solarwinds
SolarWinds offers an infrastructure monitoring tool for unified observability across various cloud environments and data centers. The performance data and operational logs offered by the tool can be used by security auditors to identify potential security vulnerabilities and compliance fail-points. The tool offers multiple features to help security admins ensure a protected infrastructure with reliable threat intelligence.
Features:
- Deep visibility: The performance data and logs collected by the tool can offer essential insights into complex infrastructure workloads and environments. These insights, in turn, offer visibility into the security coverage of these workloads, containers, databases, and more.
- Auto-discovery: SolarWinds can help continuously discover assets known or unknown in the digital ecosystem. The tool flags suspicious containers, APIs, or other cloud workloads for security gaps.
- Unified logs: Monitoring logs across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments offers more details about security metrics that can help security teams assess gaps and anomalies.
- Security monitoring: As an infrastructure monitoring tool, Solarwinds can also help detect misconfigurations or distinctive access requests to further ensure a strong security posture across the infrastructure.
You can infer more on the reviews and ratings on Solarwinds on popular spaces like Gartner Peer Insights.
10. Zabbix
Zabbix is an open-source infrastructure monitoring solution that can help security teams scan cloud-native apps, containers, databases, APIs, and more for security vulnerabilities. The tool helps track infrastructure performance and gain insights based on security metrics. The real-time security information offered by the tool can help organizations maintain a secure and optimized environment.
Features
- Real-time data collection: The platform helps collect and visualize data from various sources to help identify and respond to potential vulnerabilities quickly and effectively.
- Customizable alerts: Zabbix helps security teams discourage false alarms by offering features for customizable alerts based on the organization’s security needs and metrics.
- Data security: The platform also has access monitoring features to ensure that critical data is being accessed under strict protocols. The platform can flag any anomalous behavior in these access patterns to ensure a compromised security posture.
- Cloud security: Zabbix also offers monitoring and security optimization features across cloud workloads, including databases, containers, cloud-native apps, networks, and more. The tool can offer deep visibility into distributed cloud environments to ensure scalable security measures.
Know more about the reviews and ratings on Zabbix on popular spaces like Gartner Peer Insights.
How to Choose the Right Security Audit Tool
While security audit tools have a broad set of offerings and features for the security teams to pick from, there are certain aspects that should be non-negotiable. In this section we delve into some of these non-negotiable features that you should be looking out for.
1. Threat intelligence
- Blind-spot detection across cloud environments
- Easy detection of at-risk workloads
- Threat detection agnostic of cloud or operating system
- Highly consistent vulnerability scanning and assessment
2. Runtime visibility
- Pre-built detection libraries
- Real-time security monitoring across workloads
- Active protection for quick response to potential threats
3. Smart automation
- Automation (preferably hyperautomation) features for workflow scanning
- Customized rules for vulnerability assessment
- AI-powered features for contextualized security audit
Conclusion
True protection can only be achieved using the right security audit tools. The tools discussed in this blog offer numerous features for monitoring infrastructures, contextualizing security vulnerabilities, carrying out penetration tests, and much more. These features make these tools perfect for security auditing requirements in 2025.
What CISO and other security decision makers need to do now is to assess their security posture and figure out the best set of features that can help them with identifying, assessing and remediating security gaps in their digital ecosystems. A mindful security analysis will help them pick the right security audit tool for their organization.
If you still find it challenging to figure out your security auditing needs, you can check out SentinelOne Singularity™ Cloud Security, which has a reliable set of features that can give you a good headstart while assessing and enhancing your security posture.
FAQs
1. What factors should I consider when choosing a security audit tool?
Security audit tools can have varying functions depending on what you are looking for. Therefore, the most important factor to consider is your own security needs. Based on that you can pick infrastructure monitoring tools, vulnerability management tools, penetration testing tools, or other such solutions. Some tools might offer AI-powered vulnerability detection, some might offer deep visibility into database layers, and some might offer contextualized security data across cloud workloads. The more aware you are of your organization’s security needs, the easier it will be to pick the right security audit tool.
2. How often should I conduct security audits?
The frequency of security audits depends on factors like your organization’s size, the type of cloud environment you are using, the complexity of your networks, and more. Some penetration testing tools recommend at least two audits annually. Some vulnerability management tools might also offer ad-hoc audits for compliance management. What’s essential is that the security teams are aware of emerging threats and evolving security measures and are scheduling their audits accordingly.
3. How do I ensure my security audit tool complies with data protection regulations?
The security audit tool you are picking should declare beforehand that it is compliant with major regulations as part of its features. It is essential that the tool abides by encryption regulations, GDPR, HIPAA, and more while also heeding various regional regulations. Apart from these, the tool’s own features for data protection, data privacy, interoperability, etc. will further strengthen its compliance offerings.
4. What’s the difference between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing?
Though both are aimed at finding security gaps within a digital ecosystem, the difference between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing lies in their scope. Vulnerability scanning has a broader scope. It leverages automated processes to collect a lot of security-related data points including access logs, configuration reports, software dependencies, and more. Penetration testing, on the other hand, has more to do with the security response of a digital solution in the face of a real-world threat. It helps simulate real-world attacks to find the weak points of the digital environments.