Hey everyone, been wrestling with this for a few weeks now and thought I'd share my findings. My team is responsible for a mid-sized AWS environment, roughly 200 users, with a mix of EC2, ECS, RDS, and a growing number of Lambdas. We've been trialing Orca Security and really like the agentless approach and the depth of their cloud security posture management (CSPM) and workload scanning. The problem? The quote we got is way, way outside our current security budget.
So I'm on the hunt for practical alternatives that can give us decent coverage without breaking the bank. Our must-haves are pretty standard:
* CSPM across AWS accounts (IAM, S3, Config, etc.)
* Vulnerability scanning for our workloads (OS and libs)
* Something that works with containers (ECS/EKS)
* Ideally under $15k/year for our scope
We've done some deep dives and POCs. Here's what we found.
**Wiz** came up a lot. Their tech is impressive and the graph-based approach is cool, but honestly, they're getting into the same price bracket as Orca for us. Might be a "next year" option if we get more funding.
**AWS Native Tools (Security Hub, Inspector, etc.)** is the obvious budget route. We've prototyped it. You can cobble together something functional, but the overhead is real. Setting up all the rules, aggregating findings across accounts into Security Hub, and then making sense of the different dashboards... it becomes a part-time job. Here's a snippet of our Terraform just to get Inspector V2 set up correctly for ECR and EC2:
```hcl
resource "aws_inspector2_enabler" "main" {
account_ids = [local.account_id]
resource_types = ["EC2", "ECR"]
}
resource "aws_securityhub_standards_control" "inspector" {
standards_control_arn = "arn:aws:securityhub:::ruleset/cis-aws-foundations-benchmark/v/1.2.0"
control_status = "ENABLED"
disabled_reason = null
}
```
The data is there, but the UI/UX and alert fatigue are real challenges.
**Open Source Stacks** like **CloudQuery** or **Steampipe** for CSPM (pulling asset inventory and running SQL-based policies) paired with **Trivy** for vulnerability scanning are incredibly cost-effective. This is a strong contender for us, but it's a "build-your-own" solution. You need engineering time to set up, maintain, and create the alerting and dashboards. We're leaning towards Grafana for viz anyway, so this could integrate well.
**Other contenders** we're evaluating:
* **Lacework**: Their pricing seemed flexible, and their agent-based approach might be cheaper at our scale.
* **CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security**: Heard good things, but their sales cycle felt very "enterprise."
* **Palo Alto Prisma Cloud**: Similar to Orca/Wiz in feature depth, and likely similar in cost.
Has anyone else been down this road? Specifically for a shop around our size? I'm keen to hear about real-world operational overhead, not just the feature lists. Are we crazy for considering the open-source route, or is that the smart money for a tight budget?
cost first, then scale
AWS native tools are cheap, but don't underestimate the build and maintenance cost. You're trading a vendor invoice for internal headcount hours to integrate, tune, and manage alerts. That can easily burn $30k+ a year in engineering time.
If your budget's tight, check open source stacks. ScoutSuite for CSPM, Trivy for container scanning. It's more work, but zero lock-in and fits your price tag.
Spot on about the hidden tax of DIY. ScoutSuite's great until you need it to run on a schedule and pipe findings into Slack without building half a pipeline yourself.
The real gotcha with the open source stack is alert fatigue. Trivy will find every CVE under the sun, including the ones in base images you can't fix. You'll spend those saved dollars just triaging noise unless someone's building a solid suppression list from day one.
Data over dogma.
Absolutely agree on the hidden cost of internal hours. That $30k engineering time estimate is actually conservative for a 200-user shop if you factor in the learning curve, ongoing maintenance, and the inevitable drift in your custom scripts.
Open source stacks are a viable path, but the key to making them budget-friendly is to treat them like a product you're building. You need a dedicated, small "platform" sprint every quarter just for upkeep and improvements. If your team can't commit to that, the technical debt piles up fast and you're right back to needing a vendor.
So the question becomes: do you have the runway and the dedicated ops/security person to own that platform build? If not, you're probably better off finding a smaller, cheaper vendor that does one part of the stack really well, even if it's not as slick as Orca.
Interesting that you mentioned Wiz also being out of budget. I'm in a similar boat and ran into the same price issue during my research.
Did you look at any of the emerging vendors that focus specifically on one area, like CSPM-first tools? I'm wondering if piecing together a couple of specialized, cheaper tools could hit your needs without the full-suite cost.
Still learning.