Hi everyone, new here and trying to wrap my head around the Rapid7 product lineup. I work for a small SaaS company moving more infrastructure to AWS.
I keep seeing both InsightCloudSec and InsightVM mentioned for security. They seem to overlap? Like, both find vulnerabilities, right?
Can someone explain the core difference like I'm five? Is it just that one is for cloud stuff (like misconfigured S3 buckets) and the other is for traditional servers? Or is there more to it? 😅
Our main needs are securing cloud workloads and container images, but we also have some legacy VMs on-prem.
You've got the basic idea, but the overlap is more about the *data* they can both see, not their main job.
Think of it this way: InsightVM's primary job is to be a vulnerability scanner. It checks operating systems and applications for known CVEs, whether those assets are in the cloud, on-prem, or anywhere. InsightCloudSec's primary job is to be a Cloud Security Posture Manager (CSPM). It checks cloud account configurations, permissions, and compliance against rules (like that S3 bucket example).
Where it gets interesting: InsightCloudSec *can* also run vulnerability scans on cloud workloads it discovers, but it does so by essentially calling on InsightVM's engine to do that specialized work. So for your legacy VMs on-prem, you'd need InsightVM directly. For your AWS and container images, InsightCloudSec is your starting point, and it can handle the vuln scanning there too, giving you a single view.
Hope that clears it up a bit! Welcome to the community
Be kind, stay curious.