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BMC Helix Cloud Security vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...
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Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Cloud and Data Center Security (5th), Container Security (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (3rd)
BMC Helix Cloud Security
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
24th
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
31st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Threat Stack Cloud Security...
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
30th
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
34th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (24th), Container Security (36th)
 

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.
SC
SecOps program for us, as a smaller company, is amazing; they know what to look for
They could give a few more insights into security groups and recommendations on how to be more effective. That's getting more into the AWS environment, specifically. I'm not sure if that's Threat Stack's plan or not, but I would like them to help us be efficient about how we're setting up security groups. They could recommend separation of VPCs and the like - really dig into our architecture. I haven't seen a whole lot of that and I think that's something that, right off the bat, could have made us smarter. Even as part of the SecOps Program, that could be helpful; a quick analysis. They're analyzing our whole infrastructure and saying, "You have one VPC and that doesn't make a lot of sense, that should be multiple VPCs and here's why." The architecture of the servers in whatever cloud-hosting provider you're on could be helpful. Other than that, they should continue to expand on their notifications and on what's a vulnerability. They do a great job of that and we want them to continue to do that. It would be cool, since the agent is already deployed and they know about the server, they know the IP address, and they know what vulnerability is there, for them to test the vulnerability and see if they can actually exploit it. Or, once we patch it, they could double-check that it can't be. I don't know how hard that would be to build. Thinking on it off the top off my head, it could be a little challenging but it could also be highly interesting. It would also be great if we could test a couple of other features like hammering a server with 100 login attempts and see what happens. Real test scenarios could be really helpful. That is probably more something close to what they do with the SOC 2 audit or the report. But more visualization of that, being able to test things out on our infrastructure to make sure we can or can't hit this box could be interesting.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has a user-friendly dashboard that I can access without any difficulty."
"The multi-cloud support is valuable. They are expanding to different clouds. It is not restricted to only AWS. It allows us to have different clouds on one platform."
"It is pretty easy to integrate with this platform. When properly integrated, it monitors end-to-end."
"The ease of use of the platform is very nice."
"The offensive security feature is valuable because it publicly detects the offensive and vulnerable things present in our domain or applications. It checks any applications with public access. Some of the applications give public access to certain files or are present over a particular domain. It detects and lets us know with evidence. That is quite good. It is protecting our infrastructure quite well."
"PingSafe offers an intuitive user interface that lets us navigate quickly and easily."
"It is advantageous in terms of time-saving and cost reduction."
"The visibility is the best part of the solution."
"It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP."
"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."
"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 features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."
"The number-one feature is the monitoring of interactive sessions on our Linux machines. We run an immutable environment, so that nothing is allowed to be changed in production... We're constantly monitoring to make sure that no one is violating that. Threat Stack is what allows us to do that."
"Threat Stack has connectivity."
"With Threat Stack, we quickly identified some AWS accounts which had services that would potentially be exposed and were able to remediate them prior to release of products."
"It has been quite helpful to have the daily alerts coming to my email, as well as the Sev 1 Alerts... We just went through a SOX audit and those were pivotal."
"We like the ability of the host security module to monitor the processes running on our servers to help us monitor activity."
"The rules are really great. They give us more visibility and control over what's being triggered. There's a large set of rules that come out-of-the-box. We can customize them and we can create our own rules based on the traffic patterns that we see."
"Every other security tool we've looked is good at containers, or at Kubernetes, is good at AWS, or at instance monitoring. But nobody is good at tying all of those things together, and that's really where Threat Stack shines."
"We're using it on container to see when activity involving executables happens, and that's great."
 

Cons

"The Kubernetes scanning on the Oracle Cloud needs to be improved. It's on the roadmap. AWS has this capability, but it's unavailable for Oracle Cloud."
"Maybe container runtime security could be improved."
"PingSafe can be improved by developing a comprehensive set of features that allow for automated workflows."
"It does not bring much threat intel from the outside world. All it does is scan. If it can also correlate things, it will be better."
"There is no break-glass account feature. They should implement this as soon as possible because we can't implement SSO without a break-glass feature."
"While SentinelOne offers robust security features, its higher cost may present a challenge for budget-conscious organizations."
"I would like PingSafe to add real-time detection of vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations."
"There's room for improvement in the graphic explorer."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features."
"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."
"I want the role-based security feature to be improved."
"I would like further support of Windows endpoint agents or the introduction of support for Windows endpoint agents."
"The compliance and governance need improvement."
"The API - which has grown quite a bit, so we're still learning it and I can't say whether it still needs improvement - was an area that had been needing it."
"The reports aren't very good. We've automated the report generation via the API and replaced almost all the reports that they generate for us using API calls instead."
"They could give a few more insights into security groups and recommendations on how to be more effective. That's getting more into the AWS environment, specifically. I'm not sure if that's Threat Stack's plan or not, but I would like them to help us be efficient about how we're setting up security groups. They could recommend separation of VPCs and the like - really dig into our architecture. I haven't seen a whole lot of that and I think that's something that, right off the bat, could have made us smarter."
"The solution’s ability to consume alerts and data in third-party tools (via APIs and export into S3 buckets) is moderate. They have some work to do in that area... The API does not mimic the features of the UI as far as reporting and pulling data out go. There's a big discrepancy there."
"The user interface can be a little bit clunky at times... There's a lot of information that needs to be waded through, and the UI just isn't great."
"The one thing that we know they're working on, but we don't have through the tool, is the application layer. As we move to a serverless environment, with AWS Fargate or direct Lambda, that's where Threat Stack does not have the capacity to provide feed. Those are areas that it's blind to now..."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an enterprise license. It is affordable. I'm not sure, but I think we pay 150,000 rupees per month."
"SentinelOne offers excellent pricing and licensing options."
"The price depends on the extension of the solution that you want to buy. If you want to buy just EDR, the price is less. XDR is a little bit more expensive. There are going to be different add-ons for Singularity."
"The tool is cost-effective."
"PingSafe is fairly priced."
"PingSafe is affordable."
"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."
"Its pricing was a little less than other providers."
"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."
"We find the licensing and pricing very easy to understand and a good value for the services provided."
"Pricing seems to be in line with the market structure. It's fine."
"It is a cost-effective choice versus other solutions on the market."
"It came in cheaper than Trend Micro when we purchased it a few years ago."
"It is very expensive compared to some other products. The pricing is definitely high."
"What we're paying now is somewhere around $15 to $20 per agent per month, if I recall correctly. The other cost we have is SecOps."
"I'm happy with the amount that we spend for the product that we get and the overall service that we get. It's not cheap, but I'm still happy with the spend."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
19%
Real Estate/Law Firm
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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?
The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools. This cost can be particularly prohibitive for small busi...
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
To enhance the notification system's efficiency, resolved issues should be promptly removed from the portal. Currentl...
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...
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Also Known As

PingSafe
TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service
Threat Stack, CSP,
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera
StatusPage.io, Walkbase, Spanning, DNAnexus, Jobcase, Nextcapital, Smartling, Veracode, 6sense
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.