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BMC Helix Cloud Security vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (11th), Container Security (13th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (9th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (1st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (8th)
BMC Helix Cloud Security
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (24th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (41st)
VMware Aria Operations
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
376
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (1st), Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BMC Helix Cloud Security1.0%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud14.0%
AWS GuardDuty11.3%
Other73.7%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
Virtualization Management Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations24.7%
IBM Turbonomic16.6%
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager10.5%
Other48.2%
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

RO
IT Security Expert at Alior Bank S.A.
Unified risk scoring has improved our cloud visibility and simplifies remediation priorities
Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IAS and SaaS. This solution provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce the work I would have to do. We are no longer based on CVSS; we are based on Qualys risk scoring, which is based on CVSS plus internal findings made by Qualys, and then assigns its own score. The TruRisk insight feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores, though I am cautious since some information is classified. Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution.
DG
Portfolio Manager/ Helix Administrator at Frontier Communications
A highly scalable and straightforward solution with a knowledgeable support team
We work on a third-party shared environment. It wouldn’t have been feasible for a smaller company. My company was actually the first one to do it. Just like any cloud security, it pays to do your research and have complimentary security involved. The product can’t be the be-all and end-all tool for your security. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.
AldoDomini - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Network Analyst at Net spa
Have faced limitations due to high costs but have maintained reliability over time
The primary issue is the pricing, which is very expensive for my company's budget. We cannot afford to pay such a large fee. We are not Microsoft or BMW; we are a small company. As a small company, I have no power to negotiate directly with VMware. Perhaps larger companies have more opportunity to contract directly with VMware, but I do not have that leverage. The only path I can follow is to change solutions. Net.spA is a company working in the field of waste management. We are not a technological company, so we do not have a large margin to justify purchasing and maintaining the VMware infrastructure at current costs.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"By integrating TotalCloud, we have significantly reduced vulnerabilities in our deployment pipeline."
"Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution."
"I highly recommend Qualys TotalCloud to other users."
"TruRisk Insights is the most important innovation they've released this year."
"Once you have your vulnerabilities fixed and your patches pushed out using Qualys TotalCloud, then you are able to eliminate threats and cyber risk."
"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable feature is its ability to link clusters of assets, providing a clear model of deployments, vulnerabilities, and statuses."
"The best part I like is the on-demand scans."
"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable feature is its agent versatility."
"It is a good tool to make sure that your containers are safe and sound."
"The most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities."
"It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP."
"Role-based security is a valuable feature."
"The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."
"The cool feature of Helix Cloud Security is that you can do all that — understand and remediate issues — in one dashboard, based on the different policies that are available for security, out-of-the-box."
"The best feature is time to value. With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud. If you have Azure and AWS deployments, you might have multiple subscriptions in Azure and usually multiple accounts in AWS. You may even be doing some GCP work (around Google Cloud Platform). It's very difficult to manage a common set of policies, even less reporting, across multiple subscriptions, accounts, and cloud environments. What BMC Helix Cloud Security does is provide a unified view or single pane of glass as to your baseline. Then, it also facilitates the ability for Level 1 or 2 operations support to take action and report on security vulnerabilities."
"Using this solution is an eye-opener; having that holistic view is the biggest eye-opener because you understand, from any of your connected cloud accounts, what your vulnerabilities are with it."
"It has also been a huge help with capacity management and with performance management."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to right-size a workload, based on historical data for that workload. It also allows us to "sanity-check" the entire infrastructure by getting monthly reports on how everything is performing and where we can make improvements. That's all done automatically, without any administrator involvement."
"If you use the vCenter stuff, it's okay... but vROps actually gives you more realistic numbers."
"One of the most valuable features is the trending analysis of our environment to make capacity-planning decisions, in addition to providing real-time analysis of events."
"Technical support is excellent; never had an issue with support with VMware."
"The biggest benefit to us is that it shows us where our pain points are; where we need more storage, where we need more network or bandwidth, where we need more CPU or more memory."
"Efficiency has been the big thing, because being able to cut down those unused workloads has freed up capacity and prevented us from having to purchase more hardware which we don't actually need."
"I find the stability of VMware Aria Operations to be impressive, rated as a stable nine out of ten."
 

Cons

"Qualys TotalCloud needs to improve its accuracy for non-Windows operating systems."
"In TotalCloud, I would suggest improvements in policy checks to cater to various inventory types like VPCs, subnets, S3 buckets, or IAMs. There is a lack of data segregation according to criticality or inventory."
"With the growing integration of AI, I would like Qualys to enhance its service offerings to better accommodate AI-related risks."
"A feature improvement could be the inclusion of Windows OS support for container security, as it is currently only supported for Linux."
"Two areas for improvement in Qualys TotalCloud are the speed of the public cloud platform and vulnerability detection."
"I think Qualys TotalCloud needs to improve its handling of zero-day vulnerabilities and supply chain management because modern ransomware attacks not only target prime critical infrastructures but also the supply chain system."
"Qualys TotalCloud has the potential to improve by integrating a hybrid platform for comprehensive management of both on-premises and cloud infrastructures."
"The onboarding process is a bit difficult. In the initial phase, it is very difficult to understand the features, what the dashboard contains, and what criteria they are using."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"Every organization out there doesn't rely on just one control body. They use FISMA control. They may use HIPAA, CIS, PCI, or SOX, then blend them. One of the things that is now in big demand for BMC Helix Cloud Security is content. That's the next journey in its lifespan, making it easier for the community to share and collaborate on content for security controls that can be measured and remediated."
"We've had some with issues connectors. The connectors have seemed to have caused a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment. The only time I've had to reach out to tech support was for that. It seems it may not have been scanning correctly or I wasn't seeing data within a specific time. But we've set up a couple of connectors in the past couple of weeks and they actually scanned the AWS environment and we had data within about 10 minutes. It's working a lot faster and I think they're making improvements as they go."
"We've had some issues with connectors; the connectors have seemed to cause a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment."
"The biggest challenge now, which is a good problem to have, with BMC Helix is content."
"BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features."
"I think its TOA interfaces are still not that comfortable. The UI could be more user-friendly, easier to use."
"I want the role-based security feature to be improved."
"In the past, when we have raised priority one tickets and they have sent us level one engineers. This wasted time because the L1 was only able to perform the troubleshooting steps that we had already completed."
"There's some improvements that they can do as far as make it more user-friendly and get away from Java."
"They should improve the vROps Federation Management Pack, so each customer can create a single pane of glass for multiple sites of vROps."
"I would like to see more features, especially in the way of Flash to HTML5."
"vROps has not really helped us avoid outages or shorten outage time."
"At the beginning, the stability was not that good. The latest versions are much better."
"With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past."
"Where the product could improve would be the UI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."
"Although Qualys TotalCloud is relatively expensive due to its unique automation features, its cost-effectiveness is rated an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"The pricing is comparable. It is built into our other product, so I cannot piecemeal it. It is a part of our subscription."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"It is a subscription model with term licensing that is usually yearly. This includes, not only the product, but support and maintenance. It is based on cloud assets. Therefore, if you have 100 cloud assets, those cloud assets are measured based on evaluation or transactions. For example, if I'm evaluating that cloud asset for CIS compliance, PCI compliance, and AWS best practices, that asset gets evaluated three times, as those are three transactions. However, the license model is based on peak asset usage. So, over a year, if you deploy 100, 1000, 500, and then 2000 assets, you will be charged for the 2000 peak of assets managed by Helix Cloud Security."
"The pricing is based on an annual subscription, upfront, and it's based on cloud assets. Whether your assets are in Azure and AWS combined, the tool tells you how many assets are being scanned and that's the number used for pricing."
"If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly."
"We have seen good ROI results. It has made our lives easier."
"The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way."
"Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way."
"Every VMware product is a licensing challenge. It's always costly. It's based on processors. From a technical side, the product is very good. The challenging part is always the licensing. They should have some kind of alternate pricing models."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten."
"I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Performing Arts
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise28
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business66
Midsize Enterprise61
Large Enterprise281
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
Areas that need improvement in every solution include the remediation part. The remediation steps should be simple en...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
Our use case involves the assets that we have under cloud, the assets exposed to the internet, and the internal appli...
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What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...
Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?
In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly compl...
What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?
For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they i...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera
Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Wiz, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP). Updated: May 2026.
896,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.