What is our primary use case?
When a customer has a multi-cloud environment with AWS, Azure, GCP, or any other cloud, maintaining posture across the cloud environment is very difficult. They need a CNAPP solution for governance and centralized compliance. It gives centralized visibility where they can track each and every cloud account, compliance check, misconfigurations, risks, and vulnerabilities. Accordingly, they can take remediation action as well. That is the main purpose of a CNAPP solution.
How has it helped my organization?
CloudGuard CNAPP helps to be compliant across a multi-tenant environment. We can be sure of the compliance status with respect to different cloud tenants. There is visibility into each and every cloud tenant. It is very easy to get visibility from a single console. Centralized management gives good granular control where we can check the risks and vulnerabilities and also do remediation centrally.
Its benefits can be realized in four weeks. It is API integration, so it is very straightforward. You integrate with the client, and you start monitoring. You get the information in real-time. The overall implementation time frame is about four weeks. The first two weeks can be for the monitoring stage. In the third week, you can fine-tune your policies, and in the fourth week, you can start remediating.
Posture management is a part of CloudGuard CNAPP. CloudGuard CNAPP is a combination of three technologies: Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM). It is a combination of technologies. When customers use CloudGuard CNAPP, they use all these three models.
Cloud Security Posture Management is very good for identifying misconfiguration. It is able to capture all misconfigurations.
They maintain different compliance standards. Apart from that, they are also very good with the alerts and notification part. Whenever they perform a scan and find a vulnerability, it is sent to different channels as an alert or notification. It is good. They only need to improve the impact analysis on CSPM.
Cloud Security Posture Management identifies the risks that are most critical to the business. In terms of time savings, it can identify a risk within 10 to 15 minutes instead of it being a day-long task. The scanning happens in almost real-time. It is a good feature they have given, and I appreciate their solution.
The scanning provided by CloudGuard Workload Protection helps to identify problems before they go live. It has good capability for that. It can perform a proactive analysis, and we can identify the risks or vulnerabilities before the exploit. This identification of problems is very important because knowing about a problematic scenario in advance and being able to address it can save us a huge business loss. A proactive analysis is very critical. In the cybersecurity domain, it is one of the critical features for every customer.
CloudGuard CNAPP gives us the severity score. When it identifies any risks or vulnerabilities, it assigns a severity score.
CloudGuard CNAPP gives good visibility across all the multi-cloud tenants. We have everything covered in one solution. It covers risks, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, compliance, data security, data loss, etc. It gives good visibility. This visibility is important for customers.
What is most valuable?
The identification of misconfigurations, maintenance of compliance in a centralized way, and visibility across all the multi-cloud tenants are the key functionalities.
What needs improvement?
The first improvement area is the impact analysis. The impact analysis that they perform can be improved. It is currently lacking. It should be more detailed.
The second improvement area is that they should adopt more remediation on various resources.
The third improvement area is that they should introduce Gen-AI capability on their platform so that remediation can be very easy. They have the threat hunting and detection part, but they need to adapt more on the Gen-AI side so that the remediation can happen automatically. People should be able to do remediation with a click. It would be a very good feature to have for remediation.
These are three main improvement areas for them. I have already provided Check Point feedback about these through another channel.
With respect to Cloud Workload Protection, they should introduce more granular security control in terms of policy. I feel they should work on it and develop it more. They need to provide more granular security control in terms of various attacks, such as the MITRE ATT&CK framework. They need to give a different policy for each technique and tactic such as ransomware, exploitation, etc. I also work with CrowdStrike, so I know about different types of granular controls. From the Cloud Workload Protection perspective, they need to improve the policy framework.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with CloudGuard CNAPP for 2 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not seen any issues. It works in the passive mode, so it does not impact performance or anything like that.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable solution. Every SaaS solution is scalable, so CloudGuard CNAPP is also a scalable solution.
How are customer service and support?
I have not contacted them much, which is a good thing. CloudGuard CNAPP works in a passive mode. If anything needs to be done, it has to be done in your cloud tenant. There are very few times when you or an admin is required to communicate with the support team.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I also work with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto. CrowdStrike does not have the CNAPP capability. CrowdStrike is an EDR solution.
Palo Alto has the Prisma solution. Its capabilities are similar to Check Point. They are similar to me. I do not see much difference. There might be some difference in the cost, but technology-wise, they are the same.
How was the initial setup?
CloudGuard CNAPP is a SaaS-based solution, and you need to integrate all your cloud accounts into that. That is it.
You need to integrate your cloud account or onboard your cloud account in the CloudGuard CNAPP solution by doing the API integration. After you onboard, you first put the cloud account in the monitoring mode. You monitor things for two weeks. After you validate your findings on CloudGuard CNAPP and you do not see any false positives, you can go for the block mode as well. That is the approach the industry should follow while onboarding any CNAPP solution.
What was our ROI?
You start to get an ROI from the day you deploy CloudGuard CNAPP or integrate it with your cloud account.
It is like insurance. When something happens, only then you realize its value. CloudGuard CNAPP works in the same way. Without such a solution, it is very difficult to find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and data breaches on each and every cloud tenant. When you integrate CloudGuard CNAPP with your cloud account, you get a single view. It is very easy for your cloud administrator to take quick action. The ROI starts once you integrate or onboard a cloud account with CloudGuard CNAPP.
What other advice do I have?
After you have subscribed to CloudGuard CNAPP, I would advise onboarding your cloud account and then monitoring your cloud account and the CloudGuard CNAPP findings for two weeks. After that, you can fine-tune the policies and then run the solution in block mode. That is the process.
A CNAPP product is mandatory for any organization that works in a multi-cloud environment.
Overall, I would rate CloudGuard CNAPP a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner