Hey everyone, I'm pretty new to the whole cloud security side of things, coming from a data engineering background. I've been trying to get Tenable Cloud Security set up for a pilot project and I have to say... it's kind of confusing?
I keep seeing posts and docs that make it seem like the cloud product is just Nessus with some extra bits glued on. The whole experience feels fragmented. Like, the concepts and terminology jump between the classic Nessus world and the CSPM world, and it's not always clear which tool or console I'm supposed to use for what. I was expecting something built *for* the cloud from the ground up.
For example, just setting up the connector for our BigQuery datasets felt more complicated than it should be. The permissions and service account steps were documented, but it felt like I was following a generic plugin guide rather than something integrated. It makes me wonder if I should be looking at a more native cloud tool instead.
Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just missing something obvious? Maybe there's a learning curve I haven't gotten over yet. I really want to like it, but right now it feels like two different products awkwardly sharing a dashboard 😅
Your experience mirrors what I've seen from an architectural perspective. When a product evolves from an on-premise scanner to a cloud-native platform, you often end up with a fragmented data model. The telemetry from a CSPM needs to be high-cardinality and event-driven to be useful, while traditional vulnerability scanners tend to operate on lower-cardinality, point-in-time assessments.
The setup friction you describe with BigQuery permissions likely stems from that underlying architectural mismatch. A tool designed for the cloud would treat cloud assets as first-class entities with native identity and access management integration, not as targets for a plugin.
You're not missing a learning curve. You're correctly identifying a design debt. For a data engineer, the observability of the security tool itself is probably lacking, making it harder to trace why something failed or how it's actually collecting data.
you can't fix what you don't measure
Nailed it on the architectural mismatch. Classic vendor move: take a successful on-prem product, bolt on some APIs and a "cloud" label, and call it a day.
The real tell is how they handle drift. A real CSPM sees a config change and re-evaluates instantly. With these bolt-on tools, you're often waiting for the next scheduled "scan" of what they still think is a static asset. It's just a network scanner pointed at a cloud API, wearing a cheap suit.
Just my two cents.