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Out of all the challenges facing modern security teams, cloud security is one of the trickiest to address. When considering that 39% of tech professionals report cybersecurity and cloud computing as their top skills gaps, many organizations simply don’t have the expertise necessary to secure cloud-based apps and services. 

However, cloud security vendor Wiz announced today it’s aiming to address these security concerns with a new integration for VMware vSphere. The new integration, unveiled at VMworld, is designed to help enterprises gain more visibility over virtual machines and vulnerabilities. 

The organization claims this integration will make Wiz the first agentless cloud security platform to protect on-premises and cloud environments, with the ability to detect vulnerabilities across services including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Kubernetes. 

Filling the cloud skills gap 

The announcement comes as more and more organizations are struggling to fill cloud skills gaps, with research showing that 57% of respondents report cloud security (cloud, data center, application security) are the hardest roles to fill. 

Yet in spite of this skills gap, the majority of enterprises are still maintaining applications and infrastructure that need to be secured across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. 

“These architectural decisions have led to security teams needing multiple siloed tools, processes and organization structures to protect these environments,” said cofounder and VP of product at Wiz, Yinon Costica. 

“This is costly and complex for businesses to maintain and leaves them without a holistic visibility or security across their organization. For example, VMware ESXi servers are constantly reaching end-to-life (recent case in point),” Costica said. 

Costica notes that many organizations use these virtual machines to run critical applications, and need to ensure there aren’t any exploitable vulnerabilities to mitigate the risk of cyberattacks and “severe business disruptions.” 

The problem is that most cloud security teams don’t have complete visibility over the risks of these machines due to lack of specialized knowledge and tooling.  

Wiz’s new vSphere integration combats this by providing cloud security teams with more transparency over the vulnerabilities of virtual machines so they can monitor their security and compliance posture and ensure that critical applications aren’t exposed to threat actors. 

Reviewing the cloud security market 

As a vendor, Wiz falls within the cloud security market, which researchers anticipate will reach a value of $97.3 billion by 2030 as more organizations focus on securing their cloud environments. 

One of Wiz’s most prominent competitors is Palo Alto Networks‘ Prisma Cloud, a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) with SPM and cloud workload protection (CWP) capabilities that provides visibility over anomalies and threats across the cloud. Palo Alto Networks recently announced raising revenue of $1.6 billion for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022. 

Another competitor is CrowdStrike, which offers its own CNAPP solution that increases security teams’ visibility over cloud assets, so they can monitor misconfigurations, with automated discovery and runtime protection for cloud workloads. 

CrowdStrike announced it had raised $431 million in total revenue for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022. 

According to Costica, the key differentiator between Wiz and these solutions is its agentless approach. 

“Wiz is a fully agentless cloud security solution that not only provides broad visibility into or across any major cloud environment with feature parity across providers, but leverages the Wiz Security Graph to map the interconnections between resources and correlate all major risk factors so teams can identify every critical risk,” Costica said.