BMC Helix Cloud Security vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

BMC and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. BMC is ranked #24 with an average rating of 7.5, while Cisco is ranked #16 with an average rating of 9.5. Additionally, 80% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

BMC Helix Cloud Security and Cisco Secure Workload are key players in the cloud security sector. Cisco Secure Workload holds an advantage due to its comprehensive features that justify its higher pricing, appealing to users seeking robust capabilities.

Features: BMC Helix Cloud Security provides flexible automation, cost-effectiveness, and user-friendly support. Cisco Secure Workload highlights include robust scalability, deep integration, and advanced threat detection tools that appeal to users focused on feature-rich security solutions.

Room for Improvement: BMC Helix Cloud Security could improve in scalability, third-party integration, and expanding advanced features to match enterprise needs. Cisco Secure Workload requires enhancements in management tools, documentation clarity, and simplifying complex feature sets to streamline user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC Helix Cloud Security is known for easy deployment and dependable customer support. Cisco Secure Workload, while having a complex setup, benefits from a responsive support team assisting with deployment challenges. This aspect influences users in making technology stack decisions.

Pricing and ROI: BMC Helix Cloud Security offers competitive pricing and promises a favorable ROI for small to mid-sized businesses. Cisco Secure Workload, with its higher costs, is seen as a valuable long-term investment with an extensive feature set supporting growth, attracting enterprises seeking comprehensive security solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload

December 2024

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Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

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GregoireSoukiassian

Consultant at Ministry of Research and Education

Effectively addresses security concerns but could use enhancement in terms of integration

BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features. It currently consists of separate point solutions that don't flow together as seamlessly as they could. This lack of integration, unlike platforms like ServiceNow, may be due to historical factors. Enhancing this integration would make it a more compelling choice from a business perspective and offer a smoother user experience. In the next release of BMC Helix Cloud Security, I would like to see additional features, particularly AI integration, which has already been announced. AI integration could bring more precision to the platform, making it even more interesting and effective.

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Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There's real-time threat detection. It can show threats and find issues based on their severity and helps us with real-time monitoring."

"The UI is responsive and user-friendly."

"As a frequently audited company, we value PingSafe's compliance monitoring features. They give us a report with a compliance score for how well we meet certain regulatory standards, like HIPAA. We can show our compliance as a percentage. It's also a way to show that we are serious about security."

"The key strength of Singularity Cloud Security lies in its ability to pinpoint vulnerabilities in our cloud accounts and identify suspicious activity that warrants further investigation."

"Cloud Native Security's best feature is its ability to identify hard-coded secrets during pull request reviews."

"It integrates very well. We sell different products from different vendors. We know that the SentinelOne Singularity platform can be integrated with several different solutions from different vendors."

"We like PingSafe's vulnerability assessment and management features, and its vulnerability databases."

"We've seen a reduction in resources devoted to vulnerability monitoring. Before PingSafe we spent a lot of time monitoring and fixing these issues. PingSafe enabled us to divert more resources to the production environment."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"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."

"Role-based security is a valuable feature."

"The most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities."

"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."

"It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP."

"The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."

"It's stable."

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"There should be more documentation about the product."

"They need more experienced support personnel."

"Scanning capabilities should be added for the dark web."

"The cloud-based operations might pose challenges in areas with limited or unavailable internet connectivity."

"We've found a lot of false positives."

"Currently, we would have to export our vulnerability report to an .xlsx file, and review it in an Excel spreadsheet, and then we sort of compile a list from there. It would be cool if there was a way to actually toggle multiple applications for review and then see those file paths on multiple users rather than only one user at a time or only one application at a time."

"I would like to see the map feature improve. It's good, but it isn't fully developed. It lets us use custom resources and policies but does not allow us to perform some actions. I would also like more custom integration and runtime security for Kubernetes."

"The cloud-based operations might pose challenges in areas with limited or unavailable internet connectivity. Desktop features might be useful for smaller organizations with less complex security needs."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"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."

"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."

"BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features."

"I want the role-based security feature to be improved."

"The UI could be more user-friendly."

"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."

"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PingSafe is affordable."

"PingSafe is less expensive than other options."

"I am personally not taking care of the pricing part, but when we moved from CrowdStrike to PingSafe, there were some savings. The price of CrowdStrike was quite high. Compared to that, the price of PingSafe was low. PingSafe is charging based on the subscription model. If I want to add an AWS subscription, I need to pay more. It should not be based on subscription. It should be based on the number of servers that I am scanning."

"We found it to be fine for us. Its price was competitive. It was something we were happy with. We are not a Fortune 500 company, so I do not know how pricing scales at the top end, but for our cloud environment, it works very well."

"It was reasonable pricing for me."

"PingSafe is fairly priced."

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's pricing is good."

"The tool is cost-effective."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

19%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Energy/Utilities Company

Computer Software Company

28%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools. This cost can be particularly prohibitive for small busi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

To enhance the notification system's efficiency, resolved issues should be promptly removed from the portal. Currentl...

See all answers

What do you like most about BMC Helix Cloud Security?

The most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix Cloud Security?

I would rate the price of BMC Helix Cloud Security as a seven in terms of costliness. It is not the cheapest option a...

See all answers

What needs improvement with BMC Helix Cloud Security?

BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features. It currently consists...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 31% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 23% of the time

AWS GuardDuty vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 8% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

CloudBolt vs BMC Helix Cloud Security

Compared 42% of the time

Zscaler Internet Access vs BMC Helix Cloud Security

Compared 31% of the time

Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform vs BMC Helix Cloud Security

Compared 27% of the time

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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 20% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 19% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 12% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 11% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

October 2024

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

BMC Helix Cloud Security

December 2024

Download BMC Helix Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

December 2024

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service

Cisco Tetration

Learn More

SentinelOne

BMC

Cisco

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

BMC Helix Cloud Security is a SaaS tool designed to help organizations reduce compliance and security lapses resulting from next-gen container and cloud technologies. The solution offers a fully transparent, user-friendly view of all compliance data gathered throughout container resources, cloud, and data centers. BMC Helix Cloud Security can be used to insert compliance inquiries precisely in DevOps workflows for immediate assessment in relation to critical “go, no-go” conclusions throughout the entire workflow.

BMC Helix Cloud Security offers enterprise organizations a unique compliance solution with robust functionalities to concentrate on numerous use processes that may interfere with digital transfigurations, such as:

Discovering resources, accounts, and configurations that are non-compliant with standard regulations or the organization's own policies and protocols.
Multi-source cloud compliance for PaaS service infrastructures, networks, storage, and containers.
DevOps workflows with melded security and compliance for WebApp application blueprints and weaknesses, and all application libraries.
Out-of-box capabilities for immediate compliance integration for DevOps workflows.

BMC Helix Cloud Security is SaaS, which makes it a very flexible solution. It is able to integrate seamlessly with many of today’s enterprises’ demands. BMC Helix Cloud Security can easily perform as a policy-as-code (YAML) based protocol language, open RESTful APIs, or by seamlessly compiling extensible data connectors.

Many of today's enterprise organizations must comply with numerous policies and regulations to maintain effective operations. BMC Helix Cloud Security ensures an enterprise organization is able to satisfy regulatory standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, Defense Information System Agency (DISA), or any other stringent government or internal organizational compliance standards. The solution has a comprehensive compliance policy that utilizes mode-two capabilities and will ensure that an enterprise organization will greatly minimize or even negate the threat of ransomware and data breaches throughout its network.

BMC Helix Cloud Security will also see that container and container hosts are configured correctly and will then regularly audit to ensure compliance at the three important levels of compliance - images, daemon configuration, and host configuration.

BMC Helix Cloud Security is designed to identify vulnerabilities by dissecting and thoroughly investigating compliance data for container and cloud resources and delivering the outcomes through a friendly, easy-to-understand dashboard. The solution can also provide support for unique or custom sources, provided that data is in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

BMC Helix Cloud security is also able to help discover and minimize vulnerabilities created by new services, objects, and resources instituted by containers and public clouds. These can sometimes be forgotten, creating a tremendous risk to an organization. BMC Helix Cloud Security will ensure these new services will be carefully and continually monitored to ensure industry and government standards and regulations are not being compromised. The solution is continually dissecting data and then will deliver outcomes in a dynamic, easy-to-understand dashboard.

BMC Helix Cloud Security offers a user-friendly, robust, complete compliance strategy to ensure organizations maintain the highest levels of productivity and profitability while negating the risk of any type of compliance vulnerabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload

December 2024

Free Report: BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload

Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

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