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BMC Helix Cloud Security vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Cloud and Data Center Security (5th), Container Security (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (2nd)
BMC Helix Cloud Security
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (28th)
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (7th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.5%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC Helix Cloud Security is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 3.1%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew W - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
GregoireSoukiassian - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The cooperative nature of SentinelOne has influenced our decision not to shift."
"The solution helped free other staff to work on other projects or other tasks. We basically just had to do a bunch of upfront configuring. With it, we do not have to spend as much time in the console."
"PingSafe stands out for its user-friendly interface and intuitive software, making it easy to navigate and use."
"You not only get to know about vulnerabilities and misconfigurations but also some of the actual"
"The best features we value in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security include compliance monitoring features, as we are a frequently audited company. They provide reports with compliance scores, showing how well we meet certain regulatory standards, such as HIPAA, and we can show our compliance as a percentage."
"SentinelOne stands out with its responsiveness to feature requests for Singularity Cloud Security."
"Singularity Cloud Native Security provides us with a platform to scan instances when they are getting created, and the dashboard helps us to identify the critical issues."
"PingSafe's most valuable feature is its unified console."
"The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."
"The most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities."
"Role-based security is a valuable feature."
"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."
"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."
"Scalability is its most valuable feature."
"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."
"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."
"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."
"It's stable."
"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."
 

Cons

"They can add more widgets to its dashboard. A centralized dashboard with numerous metrics would improve user understanding."
"PingSafe can improve by eliminating 100 percent of the false positives."
"For vulnerabilities, they are showing CVE ID. The naming convention should be better so that it indicates the container where a vulnerability is present. Currently, they are only showing CVE ID, but the same CVE ID might be present in multiple containers. We would like to have the container name so that we can easily fix the issue."
"With Cloud Native Security, we can't selectively enable or disable alerts based on our specific use case."
"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."
"here is a bit of a learning curve. However, you only need two to three days to identify options and get accustomed."
"I used to work on AWS. At times, I would generate a normal bug in my system, and then I would check PingSafe. The alert used to come after about three and a half hours. It used to take that long to generate the alert about the vulnerability in my system. If a hacker attacks a system and PingSafe takes three to four hours to generate an alert, it will not be beneficial for the company. It would be helpful if we get the alert in five to ten minutes."
"From my personal experience, the alerting system needs to be faster. If something happens in our infrastructure, the alert appears on the dashboard, but I have to log in to the dashboard and refresh it."
"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."
"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."
"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."
"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."
"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."
"It has an uninviting interface."
"The product must be integrated with the cloud."
"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 interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is constant. It has been constant over the previous year, so I am happy with it. However, price distribution can be better explained. That is the only area I am worried about. Otherwise, the pricing is very reasonable."
"SentinelOne offers excellent pricing and licensing options."
"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."
"It's not expensive. The product is in its initial growth stages and appears more competitive compared to others. It comes in different variants, and I believe the enterprise version costs around $55 per user per year. I would rate it a five, somewhere fairly moderate."
"I understand that SentinelOne is a market leader, but the bill we received was astronomical."
"Pricing is based on modules, which was ideal for us."
"Its pricing was a little less than other providers."
"The pricing for PingSafe in India was more reasonable than other competitors."
"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."
"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."
"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 outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Computer Software Company
26%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?
It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market.
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
The documentation could be better. Besides improving the documentation, obtaining a professional or partner specializ...
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.
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...
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...
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?
The product provides multiple-device integration.
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...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...
 

Also Known As

PingSafe
TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service
Cisco Tetration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
848,253 professionals have used our research since 2012.