Lacework alternatives that are not Sysdig - for a 100-person finance team

I've been in that exact spot with Lacework's alert fatigue turning into a full time job just for triage. The noise issue often comes from their default policies being a bit too eager to flag anything.

On the cost opacity, you're hitting on a critical point for finance teams. With your mix of EKS, EC2, and Lambda, you'll want a vendor who can give you a fixed-fee or at least a very predictable model based on something stable, like number of accounts or assets, not ephemeral containers. That legwork in the sales cycle is painful but essential.

For your stack, have you looked at Wiz? Their agentless approach for AWS might sidestep the pain points you had with Sysdig, and their compliance mapping is strong. Orca Security is another one that comes up often in these discussions for finance.

Given your explicit exclusion of agent based models and the emphasis on compliance for a finance team, your list will naturally narrow to agentless CNAPPs. Wiz and Orca are solid suggestions, but I'd add Palo Alto Prisma Cloud to the shortlist.

Their financial services vertical experience is extensive, and they offer fixed fee licensing based on your AWS Organization's number of accounts. This directly addresses your cost opacity pain point. Their Terraform and CloudFormation scanning, including drift detection, is particularly strong for the IaC requirement you outlined.

However, their alerting can be just as noisy as Lacework's out of the box. The key differentiator you should test in any PoC is the granularity of their policy engine for suppressing false positives and creating risk based scoring. Don't just evaluate the finding count, evaluate the workflow to tune it.

Yeah, the alert fatigue and cost stuff are the worst parts. We're a smaller team but had the same issues. It got to where we'd just ignore the dashboards because they were always red.

For agentless options, we looked at Wiz. Their compliance dashboards are really clear, which our auditors liked. But we got some sticker shock on the final quote, so make sure you get them to commit to that fixed-fee model in writing before the PoC.

How are you planning to test the policy tuning? That seems to be the real key for cutting the noise.

"Sticker shock on the final quote" is the standard Wiz experience. Their sales pitch is all about simplicity, then the contract hits you with line items for every add-on module.

You're right about getting the fixed fee in writing, but that only covers the base platform. Wait until next year's "true-up" when they audit your cloud footprint and claim you've outgrown your committed tier. The predictability vanishes.

For policy tuning, the PoC is useless unless you use your own Terraform code and actual runtime data from the last month. Their demo environment will be pre-sanitized. If they won't ingest your historical data for the trial, walk away.

Absolutely, that "true-up" catch is brutal and something I've seen first-hand. You lock in a fixed fee based on your current AWS Org structure, only to have them redefine the unit of measure later. Suddenly, your new dev account spun up for a two week project counts as a permanent expansion.

The advice about using your own historical data for the PoC is the only way to go. We learned that the hard way. A clean demo environment shows you a pretty dashboard, but it tells you nothing about how the tool will handle your specific, messy alerts. If a vendor resists ingesting a snapshot of your actual Lacework data, it's a huge red flag about their confidence in filtering out noise.

The billing model feels like a black box is exactly right. It's not just unpredictable, it's deliberately opaque to prevent comparison. You need to demand per-asset breakdowns from vendors now.

For a team your size in finance, with that AWS/EKS mix, I'd run a focused benchmark on two specific areas during your PoC, using your own data:
1. **Agentless container image scan speed** on a representative sample of your images. Time it from scan trigger to actionable result in the console. Slow scans bottleneck deployments.
2. **IaC policy execution time** for a directory of your Terraform modules. This directly impacts CI/CD pipeline duration. We saw variance from 45 seconds to over 4 minutes for the same codebase.

This gives you hard numbers on operational impact, beyond just the feature checklist. Wiz and Prisma Cloud will both claim they're fast. Make them prove it with your own workloads.

Good point about concrete benchmarks. For image scanning, also measure the cold start latency for the first scan after a period of inactivity. Some agentless platforms spin up temporary resources, and that initial delay can be a surprise.

On IaC scan time, the variance often depends on the number of custom policy checks. You'll want to test with your specific compliance benchmarks (PCI, NIST) enabled, as they add significant overhead compared to a basic CIS scan.

You've laid out a clear and specific set of requirements and pain points, which is the perfect way to start this kind of evaluation. The "cost opacity" you mentioned with Lacework is something I've seen cause real frustration when teams try to forecast budgets.

Given the finance focus and need for predictability, I'd suggest you make contractual terms a primary evaluation criterion, right alongside technical features. When you get those initial demos, ask each vendor for a standard, redlined service agreement upfront. Look for clauses on price increases, true-up mechanics, and definitions of the unit being counted. Sometimes the hardest part isn't finding the right tool, it's agreeing on what you're actually buying.