Elastic releases security solution for the cloud

Today, Elastic announced the launch of Elastic Security for Cloud, extending the capabilities of the existing Elastic Security offering, which included SIEM and endpoint protection, to incorporate cloud risk and posture management and cloud workload protection. 

The new solution allows enterprises to manage their security posture for cloud-native and hybrid environments with infrastructure detection and response (IDR) and a machine learning offering that can detect known and unknown threats in cloud environments.  

This approach means that enterprises can detect and respond to malicious activity in the cloud as soon as possible to minimize the risk and damage caused by intrusions. 

Addressing cloud complexity 

The release comes as modern enterprises are struggling to secure cloud environments. 

Research shows that not only are 76% of organizations using two or more cloud providers, but also that 35% of organizations have more than 50% of their workloads in the cloud. This means for many organizations, protecting the cloud attack surface is now vital to maintaining operational stability. 

In other words, the complexity of cloud deployments has created a need for solutions with cloud detection and response capabilities, so that enterprises can respond to threat actors who are targeting this new attack surface. 

“The world has rapidly transitioned to the cloud and chosen operations over security. Cloud infrastructure is stood up and torn down at a blazing rate and many different teams are deploying these cloud instances. Just answering the question, ‘Am I good?’ is an increasingly complex question to answer for CIO/CISOs,” said Mike Nichols, vice president of product for Elastic Security 

Elastic’s answer to monitoring these environments, is a cloud posture management and IDR solution that can improve security teams visibility over external threats. 

The cloud security market 

Elastic Security is competing in the global cloud security market, which researchers valued at $40.8 billion in 2021 and anticipate will grow to $77.5 billion by 2026 as enterprises attempt to keep up with the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks,  and rise in bring your own device (BYOD) and (choose your own device) policies.

In the realm of cloud security, one of Elastic’s main competitors is Splunk, a cloud and observability monitoring platform that can monitor public clouds, apps, services, on-premise data centers, and edge services. Last year, Splunk announced it had received a $1 billion investment from Silver Lake. 

Another competitor in the market is Wazuh, an XDR and SIEM tool designed for protecting endpoints and cloud workloads with vulnerability detection, log data analysis, workload protection, and container security. 

Wazhu currently has more than 10 million downloads per year and is used by a range of companies including Verifone, Walgreens, Rappi, Grubhub, Intuit, and more. 

Although, one of the key differentiators between Elastic Security is that the solution is built on the Elastic Search Platform, with analytics, SIEM, endpoint protection, XDR and cloud security all offered as part of one single offering.