Lacework Reviews

Name: Lacework
Brand: Fortinet
Rating: 4 (10 reviews)

4.3 out of 5

10 reviews
90% willing to recommend

139 followers

What is Lacework?

Lacework is a cloud security platform whose Polygraph Data Platform automates cloud security at scale so customers can innovate with speed and safety. Lacework is the only security platform that can collect, analyze, and accurately correlate data across an organization’s AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments, and narrow it down to the handful of security events that matter. As a breach detection and investigation tool, Lacework provides information on when and how a breach happened, including the users, machines, and applications involved in the breach. By using machine learning and behavioral analytics, the solution can automatically learn what's normal for your environment and reveal any abnormal behavior. In addition, Lacework gives you continuous visibility to find vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and malicious activity across your cloud environment.

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Lacework is the #7 ranked solution in top Compliance Management solutions, #10 ranked solution in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, #10 ranked solution in top Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) solutions, #12 ranked solution in Container Security Solutions, #12 ranked solution in top Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions, and #13 ranked solution in top Vulnerability Management solutions. PeerSpot users give Lacework an average rating of 8.6 out of 10. Lacework is most commonly compared to Cloudflare: Lacework vs Cloudflare. Lacework is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 58% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a computer software company, accounting for 18% of all views.

Helped 814,763 peers since 2012

Featured reviews

Robert Croteau

Director of Enablement at Avesha

The most valuable feature is Lacework's ability to distill all the security and audit logs. I recommend it to my customers. Normally, when I consult for other customers that are getting into the cloud, we use native security tools. It's more of a rule-based engine. They have to go in and put their policies in place. It's hard for them to implement that, especially if they don't have a real security team. The team's policymakers don't do anything. Lacework takes out all the noise and gives them bits of things that actually matter with the application after it learns the behavior.

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Carlos Vitrano

Cloud security director at Medallia

Its integrations with third-party SIEMs can be better. That is one of the things that we discussed with them. We have integrations, for instance, with Splunk. The data that we are receiving in Splunk is huge, and it is valid because Lacework has a bunch of data that they can provide to you. However, to be able to import the data and create alerts, we needed to do some work, so integration is one of the things that they can improve. For container security, how they scan images and how they provide results is something that they need to continue improving in terms of visibility. We already have visibility to several artifacts, but they can take that to the next level and see what else they can do. There can be better integrations with CI/CD pipelines. There can be improvements in terms of how we can take action or how we can report from the number of inventories they are providing to us.

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Russell

Information Security Engineer at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

Lacework ranks high, primarily due to its role in alerting on unexpected behavior, potential vulnerabilities, and misconfiguration against policies. Currently, a view of all policies is available within the console. However, At some point in the past, I wanted a more tailored display of my compliance posture, focusing specifically on policies relevant to me. For instance, if I'm not subject to HIPAA regulations, I'd prefer not to see the HIPAA compliance details. It's worth noting that even with this request, there exists a filtering mechanism to control the type of compliance information visible. This flexibility provides a workaround to my preference, which is why it's challenging for me to definitively state my exact improvement request.

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Lacework mindshare

Product category:

As of November 2024, the mindshare of Lacework in the Vulnerability Management category stands at 1.5%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

Lacework's most valuable features include identifying vulnerabilities and anomalous activities, continuously monitoring configurations, providing compliance reports, and distilling security and audit logs. It offers insights into an organization's security posture and helps users see their environment from an attacker's perspective. The tool prioritizes alerts based on severity and provides context to understand the likelihood of an adversary exploiting vulnerabilities. Users appreciate the ease of use and machine learning anomaly detection.

"I find the cloud configuration compliance scanning mature. It generates a lot of data and supports major frameworks like ISO 27001 or SOC 2, providing reports and datasets. Another feature I appreciate is setting custom alerts for specific events. Additionally, I value the agent-based monitoring and scanning for compute nodes. It gives us deeper insights into our workloads and helps identify vulnerabilities across our deployed assets."
"Lacework is helping a lot in reducing the noise of the alerts. Usually, whenever you have a tool in place, you have a lot of noise in terms of alerts, but the time for an engineer to look into those alerts is limited. Lacework is helping us to consolidate the information that we are getting from the agents and other sources. We are able to focus only on the things that matter, which is the most valuable thing for us. It saves time, and for investigations, we have the right context to take action."
"Polygraph compliance is a valuable feature. In our perspective, it delivers significant benefits. The clarity it offers, along with the ability to identify and address misconfigurations, is invaluable. When such issues arise, we promptly acknowledge and take action, effectively collaborating with our teams and the responsible parties for those assets. This enables us to promptly manage problems as soon as they arise."

Room for Improvement

Users have expressed that Lacework could improve in various areas, including making the platform more intuitive and user-friendly, reducing the number of alerts and improving the speed of scanning, communicating changes to customers more effectively, enabling sorting and filtering of alerts and policies, obtaining a FedRAMP moderate authorization, adding remediation features and improving integration with other systems. Additionally, users have suggested that Lacework could benefit from better visibility, compliance-related metrics, and IAM security control, as well as data governance and detection capabilities.

"The solution lacks a cohesive data model, making extracting the necessary data from the platform challenging. It uses its own LQL query language, and each database across different layers and modules is structured differently, complicating correlation efforts. Consequently, I had to create extensive custom reports outside Lacework because their default dashboards didn't communicate risk metrics. They're addressing these issues by redesigning their tools, including introducing the dashboard, which is a step closer to actionable insights but still needs refinement."
"Its integrations with third-party SIEMs can be better. That is one of the things that we discussed with them."
"There are a couple of the difficulties we encounter in the realm of cybersecurity, or security as a whole, that relate to potentially limited clarity. Having the capacity to perceive the configuration aspect and having the ability to contribute to it holds substantial advantages, in my view.It ranks high, primarily due to its role in guaranteeing compliance and the potential to uncover vulnerabilities, which could infiltrate the system and introduce potential risks.I had been exploring a specific feature that captured my interest. However, just yesterday, I participated in a product update session that announced the imminent arrival of this feature. The feature involves real-time alerting. This was something I had been anticipating, and it seems that this capability is now being integrated, possibly as part of threat intelligence. While anomaly events consistently and promptly appear in the console, certain alerts tend to experience delays before being displayed. Yet, with the recent product update, this issue is expected to be resolved.Currently, a comprehensive view of all policies is available within the console. However, I want a more tailored display of my compliance posture, focusing specifically on policies relevant to me. For instance, if I'm not subject to HIPAA regulations, I'd prefer not to see the HIPAA compliance details. It's worth noting that even with this request, there exists a filtering mechanism to control the type of compliance information visible. This flexibility provides a workaround to my preference, which is why it's challenging for me to definitively state my exact request."

ROI

Some users have found that Lacework has not provided a clear ROI, while others have seen significant benefits.

Pricing

Lacework's pricing has seen improvement and they have an interesting licensing structure where a "resource" is defined as 200 resources per "Lacework unit." The initial lack of clarity on what a "resource" was led to feedback and improvement. Lacework has been flexible with early adopters and customers and tries to balance out numbers for those with a lot of ephemeral resources. The price is rated as seven out of ten for affordability and the licensing fee is a one-time fee with no additional charges, though discounts may be available.

"My smaller deployments cost around 200,000 a year, which is probably not as expensive as Wiz."
"It is slightly expensive. It depends on how big your environment is, but it is expensive. Right now, we are spending a lot of money. We have covered all of the cloud providers and most of our colocation facilities as well, so we cannot complain, but it is slightly expensive. It is not super expensive."
"The pricing has gotten better. That scenario was somewhat unstable. They have a rather interesting licensing structure. I believe you get 200 resources per "Lacework unit." It was difficult, in the beginning, to figure out exactly what a "resource" was... That was a problem until about a year or so ago.They have improved it and it has stabilized quite a bit."

Popular Use Cases

Lacework is primarily used for cloud security monitoring, compliance, vulnerability management, anomaly detection, and ingesting logs from multiple cloud providers. It is used by organizations to ensure security posture in their cloud infrastructure and to detect and respond to security threats. One of its main features includes generating reports to determine if a company is in compliance with AWS regulations. It is also used to protect cloud environments, particularly Kubernetes, and to offer container environment's detecting capabilities.

Service and Support

Lacework's customer service and support are highly responsive and helpful according to the reviews. They offer a lot of advice and suggestions, and are proactive in reaching out to customers. Their technical team is connected all the time and responds within minutes. They are good at working through issues in a timely manner and have a method of escalating problems. The account guys are also super responsive. There have been some stickier and more challenging problems that have taken more time to resolve, but generally speaking, they've been pretty good.

Deployment

Lacework's initial setup was found to be straightforward by most reviewers, with some using Terraform scripts to deploy it quickly. It was rolled out across multiple AWS accounts and did not require much maintenance. The resource feature provided visibility into all containers and instances, making it easy to configure hosts without the Lacework agent.

Scalability

Lacework's solution is highly scalable, with users reporting no issues in adding resources and monitoring large numbers of people. The solution is flexible and can be deployed across multiple cloud environments, including AWS, GCP, and Azure. While the licensing structure requires some attention, it is easy to scale and the company is accommodating in this regard. Users rate the scalability of the solution highly, with no issues reported in scaling to large numbers of hosts or agents. While some concerns have been raised around the potential for difficulties when populating large environments, these were not experienced by users in organizations with fewer than 20 people using the solution.

Stability

Lacework's stability is viewed positively by users. While some have experienced minor issues or lag, they haven't faced any major outages or disruptions. The company is seen as growing and improving, with frequent webinars on new features and hires from other organizations. However, there are some accuracy issues with detection and data models that could be improved.

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our Lacework Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Review data by company size

By reviewers

By visitors reading reviews

Top industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Healthcare Company

University

Educational Organization

Government

Insurance Company

Construction Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Media Company

Comms Service Provider

Non Profit

Energy/Utilities Company

Legal Firm

Logistics Company

Hospitality Company

Outsourcing Company

Wholesaler/Distributor

Recreational Facilities/Services Company

Transportation Company

Performing Arts

Venture Capital & Private Equity Firm

Pharma/Biotech Company

Consumer Goods Company

Leisure / Travel Company

Agriculture

Compare Lacework with alternative products

Learn more about Lacework

Lacework Features

Lacework has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Dashboards
Reports
Workflow management
Administration console
Governance
Policy enforcement
Auditing
Access control
Workflow management
Compliance monitoring
Anomaly detection
Data loss prevention
Cloud gap analytics
Host compliance

Lacework Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Lacework. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Security visibility: Get deep observability into your cloud accounts, workloads, and microservices to give you tighter security control.

Threat detection: By using Lacework, your organization can identify common security events that target your cloud servers, containers, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) accounts so you can take action on them quickly.

Flexible deployment: With Lacework, you have the option to deploy the way you prefer - either agent or agentless - which provides the visibility needed to have maximum security for cloud accounts and systems. Because Lacework offers an easy-to-deploy layered approach, you gain quick time to value.

Configuration compliance: With the Lacework solution, you can easily spot IaaS account configurations that are non-compliant and identify opportunities to apply security best practices.

Synced teams: Lacework allows your teams to operate smarter and bridge the gap between security, Dev, and Ops regardless of your team's size or experience level.

Gain meaningful security insights: Lacework provides meaningful security insights, alerting you of issues before they reach production from your existing workflows. This way you can build apps quickly and confidently.

Increased revenue streams: Because the solution has built-in security from the first line of code early on, it helps users unlock higher revenue streams.

Helps avoid development delays: The Lacework solution helps you better prioritize security fixes by making security information accessible to DevOps and security teams for earlier risk mitigation that speeds innovation.

Increased productivity: Lacework provides alerts with all the context you need and eliminates data silos and costly investigations, enabling you to boost productivity.

Correlate and contextualize behaviors: Lacework can take attributes and data points from your unique environment and correlate them together into behaviors.

Simplified cloud security posture and compliance: With the Lacework platform, you can get comprehensive visibility and continuous tracking to reduce risks and meet compliance requirements so you can improve your bottom line.

Address vulnerabilities before it is too late: Lacework enables you to limit your attack surface so you can address the riskiest vulnerabilities early in the development cycle.

Lacework was previously known as Polygraph.