We're evaluating cloud security platforms for a mid-market finance team. Our primary stack is AWS EKS with a mix of managed services (RDS, S3). We need CSPM, vulnerability scanning for container images, and runtime protection for the Kubernetes layer. Compliance (SOC 2, eventually PCI) is a hard requirement.
The shortlist is down to Wiz and Lacework. Vendor demos were predictably slick, but I need to cut through the marketing. I care about:
* **Agentless vs. Agent-based:** Wiz is mostly agentless, Lacework leans on agents for runtime. What's the real performance hit on the cluster nodes?
* **K8s context:** Which one actually maps vulnerabilities to running pods/nodes better? I don't want a list of CVEs; I need to know which specific deployments are affected.
* **Data pipeline & cost:** Lacework's data lake model seems powerful but expensive. Wiz's graph-based approach claims faster query times. Has anyone benchmarked this at scale?
* **Compliance reporting:** Which requires less manual work to get audit-ready reports?
Our team is lean, so false positive rates and operational overhead are critical. We can't have analysts chasing ghosts.
Key questions for anyone with hands-on experience:
* What was the actual deployment and configuration time for the Kubernetes integration?
* Are the out-of-the-box policies for finance industry benchmarks (CIS, NIST) actually usable, or do they require heavy tuning?
* Any concrete examples of how the alerting workflow integrates into Slack/Jira?
If you've run a POC on both, what were the decisive technical or cost factors? Benchmarks and reproducible observations are worth more than any sales deck.
Show me the query.
You're asking the right questions, but you're still buying the premise that their marketing materials are grounded in reality. Let's take the agentless vs. agent-based debate. Wiz's agentless approach has its own tax - those APIs and queries aren't free, and you'll see it in your cloud bill, not your node performance metrics. It's just shifting the cost center.
On K8s context, you'll be disappointed by both. The mapping of a CVE to a specific pod is only as good as the SBOM from your build pipeline, which is almost certainly incomplete. Both tools will give you a list with some correlation, but the "specific deployment" answer will require manual stitching more often than their sales engineers admit.
As for compliance reporting, neither is truly audit-ready out of the box. You'll spend weeks tuning policies and formatting outputs to satisfy your auditor's specific checklist. The real manual work isn't in generating the report, it's in validating every finding within it.
Procurement Cynic