We use it mainly for detection and response purposes. We have also started using Lacework as our vulnerability management tool, which is most important for our organization. We don't have any kind of security layer for all our cloud infrastructure so we are using Lacework as a security product for our cloud infrastructure.
Infosec Engineer - Lead at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helps us detect things based on severity and to focus on the critical and high-severity issues
Pros and Cons
- "There are many valuable features that I use in my daily work. The first are alerts and the event dossier that it generates, based on the severity. That is very insightful and helps me to have a security cap in our infrastructure. The second thing I like is the agent-based vulnerability management, which is the most accurate information."
- "I would like to see a remote access assistance feature. And the threat-hunting platform could be better."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
When I joined this organization, Lacework was being onboarded. It was in setup mode. If I compare the visibility I have had over those last 10 months with Lacework, with what visibility was like before, I now have complete visibility into my entire infrastructure. If anything happens, Lacework will definitely catch it. That is very efficient and I'm able to react before the attack.
An advantage that Lacework gives us in our environment is that it covers a vast majority of use cases, which helps us to detect things based on severity, and it helps us to have more focus on those issues. For example, last week we had an alert that said that there was an external connection made from an internal server, and our internal servers are not supposed to communicate with the external, because it's behind the VPN and it's behind the firewall. That should not happen, but it was happening. A good detection rule helped us.
In terms of seeing things from an attacker's point of view, a couple of weeks back I received an alert that a user with root permission had logged in and tried to do something he is not supposed to do, which means he didn't have admin permission. I also received an alert about policy changes. I got the user ID and did a reverse lookup in my database to find out who the user was and his department. I reached out to him and I asked him about it, and it turned out he was doing a red team activity and testing Lacework. Red team activity is very difficult to detect, but Lacework did a very good job on that.
And for continuous monitoring, we have created a kind of dashboard, although not a complete dashboard. Lacework has a better dashboard. Our major priority is to look into critical, high, and medium alerts, which we never miss. We continuously monitor for high-priority alerts. It shows us those by default in the Lacework dashboard. That helps in our daily monitoring.
With Lacework, the alert flow has been reduced a little bit, about 6 percent, but attackers never sleep. We have a lot of alerts coming in, day in and day out. It's now Christmas time and this is the perfect time for attackers to try to target an organization because as they know the response team will be outnumbered. In addition, Lacework has reduced the time it takes us in an investigation by 70 to 80 percent because it keeps complete information. That means we don't have to verify where the information came from. Rather, we can use that information in our investigation.
It helps free us up to work on other tasks. We can create custom rules to eliminate false positive alerts. These are the gray areas that we have started exploring and that gives us time to work on other stuff.
What is most valuable?
There are many valuable features that I use in my daily work. The first are alerts and the event dossier that it generates, based on the severity. That is very insightful and helps me to have a security cap in our infrastructure.
The second thing I like is the agent-based vulnerability management, which is the most accurate information. It helps us to know what the security gaps or weaknesses are in the systems and to patch them. Finding a critical weak spot is one of the best features, with the agent-based scanner. We can check it out, based on a filter of the host or container, get the vulnerability report for that particular host, and just share it with the DevOps team to patch.
For anomalous activities, Lacework has a good set of rules for detection and it gives super-informative alert information. For example, when an issue is detected that results in an alert, it doesn't just give the details. It also explains clearly what is happening, with "WH" questions. In the alert, if you click on "Why this alert has been detected," there is a clear explanation for it. Next, you can click on, "When," and it gives the time range of the detection time. The next is "What has been impacted?" That kind of accurate information means we don't have to look around or worry about the source of the information or the legitimacy of the alert.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see a remote access assistance feature. And the threat-hunting platform could be better.
Buyer's Guide
Lacework
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about Lacework. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Lacework for about 10 months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable product compared to the initial days that we had it. They are doing much better because they are also conducting frequent webinars on how to use new features whenever an update comes out.
We haven't faced any issue, like a Google outage, in the last 10 months. It's really good. I do see a little lag but it could be because of my internet connection since I'm working from home.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We use all the cloud environments, Azure, GCP, and AWS, and have deployed Lacework for all three. We have approximately 50 people who use it, on and off.
How are customer service and support?
Even though here and there there are some problems with the solution, whenever we address the issues with the Lacework team, they're always ahead of it in their response and they always are supportive.
We have a community channel as well. CSP is partnered with us and we have frequent communications with them. We have a conversation with them on a day-to-day basis on a Slack channel. Their technical team is connected all the time. The moment we post a question on that channel, we will get a response within five or 10 minutes. That is a much faster resolution than any other solution that I have used.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
We have a separate DevOps that takes care of Lacework deployment, uploading and installing the agent. My job is to make sure that we have visibility into all our containers and host-based cloud infrastructure. Lacework has a feature called resource that completely shows how many containers or instances are running with Lacework and without Lacework. I just pull that data and give it to the DevOps team. They go in and do the config of hosts that don't have a Lacework agent.
There is some maintenance involved with Lacework, but in most scenarios it isn't a problem. We always want to have visibility into everything, so we need to make sure that things are working fine.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There are very few solutions out there for cloud infrastructure. When it comes to physical infrastructure, there are already many tools. But the cloud industry is just beginning. I have worked with a few of the cloud solutions and I found Lacework is the most useful one because it has various categories of alerts.
What other advice do I have?
The security team is the most important part of any organization because they are the people who help protect your organization. For them to protect you, they need better visibility into the environment and infrastructure and certain tools to help do their jobs more easily. As an analyst, I think Lacework is much better.
When an analyst gets an alert, time becomes very crucial. His response time should be 30 minutes. In the first 15 minutes, he should be able to understand what type of attack it is, exactly what is happening, and how to stop it. And he also should come to a method of remediation to stop the attack for the short term. For all these aspects, Lacework is really much better. Any analyst, when working on an alert, will initially have the five questions: why, when, what, how, and where. That's what Lacework provides. These questions are the template for any analyst and with them, it takes me about 15 minutes to understand an alert. In the next 15 minutes, I will work on contacting the team, et cetera. From a time perspective, Lacework is much better.
Give Lacework a try. It's one of the best tools in the market that I have used so far. Except for the RTR response, the rest is fine. It is really doing a pretty good job. It will never disappoint you.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
Chief Information Security Officer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Detects pivotal anomalies faster, easy to install, and the technical support is helpful
Pros and Cons
- "The best feature, in my opinion, is the ease of use."
- "Visibility is lacking, and both compliance-related metrics and IAM security control could be improved."
What is our primary use case?
Lacework is a sales platform.
Because Kubernetes had a number of important processes that used EKS, we needed Lacework to protect the cloud environment in general and Kubernetes in particular. We required it to defend both the overall cloud posture and to offer protection. And then our container environment's detecting capabilities.
What is most valuable?
The best feature, in my opinion, is the ease of use. As well as some levels of machine learning anomaly detection that they have that can detect pivotal anomalies faster.
What needs improvement?
Visibility is lacking, and both compliance-related metrics and IAM security control could be improved. This is what Ermetic does. IAM security management controls, as well as detection of deviations and misconfigurations, are critical but not fully developed in Lacework.
There is no data governance or data visibility. It's a little bit different, in the vector of cloud security management, but Lacework does not yet support this.
I would like to see some sort of data mapping or detection. The ability to pinpoint the exact location of data. Something similar to what Flow Security is currently doing. And that is what some other companies are attempting to do with data detection capabilities. Cloud Data Detection.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used Lacewok more than 12 months ago. I evaluated it a year and a half ago, I believe, approximately 15 months ago.
I am not sure of the exact version.
It was used in the AWS environment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It appears to be functioning in terms of stability.
The impression is less that it has a lot of false positives in terms of detection and capability. There are some detections that are not particularly accurate. This is the general perception regarding data models. It needs to be improved.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I didn't notice any scalability or people-related issues because it's not a platform for widespread use.
If you try to populate a very large environment in Lacework and there is a lot of traffic, you may encounter some difficulties.
The system may struggle, but users, or operators, are not supposed to seriously disrupt or interfere with the platform.
We didn't experience any problems.
This solution was used by no more than 20 people in our organization.
But it is rarely used. You are supposed to get alerts from it from other places, such as Select PagerDuty.
The SIM system. You are not supposed to use it continuously.
How are customer service and support?
We contacted technical support briefly, but not too much. We contacted them during the initial integration phase, but after that, communication was minimal.
Technical support was fine. I would rate them a four out of five.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Several other vendors approached us. Dome9, which Check Point purchased, and Cloud Guard were both used in the past. However, when we decided to relocate, I believe I met some Lacework employees at a conference. And after reviewing the solution, we made the decision to put it to try.
They are starting to use Ermetic .
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is relatively straightforward.
The deployment was completed in two weeks. You will then have some additional time to configure everything.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We purchase the license here.
The licensing fee was approximately $80,000 USD, per year.
There may be some discounts available. However, it is a one-time fee with no additional charges.
What other advice do I have?
Currently, it is determined by your capabilities and the size of your environment.
In general, I would not recommend Lacework right now. There are more mature solutions that would be a better fit.
It is very dependent on the specific environment in which you operate. Lacework isn't necessarily bad; it's just that the more mature solutions on the market have significantly more capabilities. Prisma Cloud, for example, or Rapid7 Clouds, I believe, have more capabilities and support. In the cloud environment, better support and different security use cases are available.
However, it is similar to the situation with automobiles. You are not required to drive a Ferrari. You could buy, a simpler car and seat it for your needs. It depends on what you want to accomplish.
I would rate Lacework an eight out of ten.
It has some technical capabilities, which are not bad, but it is currently lacking some technical features. It's also prone to false positives, which I believe is due to an over-reliance on some AI detection models. But the precision of those things isn't always good.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Lacework Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: October 2024
Product Categories
Vulnerability Management Container Security Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) Compliance ManagementPopular Comparisons
Cloudflare
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Snyk
Qualys VMDR
Tenable Nessus
Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security
Rapid7 InsightVM
AWS Security Hub
AWS GuardDuty
Orca Security
Illumio
Tufin Orchestration Suite
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Lacework Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Quick Links
Learn More: Questions:
- How would you compare Wiz vs Lacework?
- How inadvisable is it to use a single vulnerability analysis tool?
- What are the benefits of continuous scanning for vulnerability management?
- When evaluating Vulnerability Management, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?
- What is a more effective approach to cyber defense: risk-based vulnerability management or vulnerability assessment?
- What are the main KPIs that need to be implemented to have better posture in vulnerability projects?
- Which is the best vulnerability scanner tool?
- What are your recommended automated penetration testing tools?
- How do you use the MITRE ATT&CK framework for improving enterprise security?
- Can you recommend API for Tenable Connector into ServiceNow