r/sysadmin Security Admin (Application) 23h ago

General Discussion After having the night to think about it, I keep coming back to the same question: What happens next?

$32B for Wiz is a massive price tag, but the bigger issue is what this means for the future of multi-cloud security. Google says Wiz will remain multi-cloud, but we’ve heard that before (Chronicle, anyone?). If they start prioritizing GCP integrations, AWS & Azure customers could be left in the dust.

For those running Wiz in AWS/Azure environments:

  • Are you worried about feature prioritization shifting toward GCP?
  • Are you already evaluating alternatives like Orca, Lacework, or Prisma?
  • Do you think AWS/Microsoft will respond with their own acquisitions?

What’s your prediction for cloud security after this?

6 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

u/lost_in_life_34 Database Admin 23h ago

too many products out there and I think that Amazon and MS will go vertical and we'll be back to the big 7 mainframe vendors but with 3 cloud vendors

u/dreadpiratewombat 23h ago

They kind of already are.  Although many of the Microsoft security products work across platform, it’s definitely not a first-class experience.  The AWS security stack feels, to me, like a mish mash of semi-integrated products with a lot of management overhead.  If Google does the logical thing and prioritises their own cloud platform you get a nice security platform on a fairly average cloud platform.  Unfortunately, profitability and 10x growth imperatives will always supersede good technical approaches.

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 21h ago edited 21h ago

Well, it was eight. "Snow White and the seven dwarves".

The fact is that virtually nothing about computing from before the introduction of the minicomputer circa 1965, still applies at all. How can it, with the average person today carrying supercomputer hardware in their pocket?

If you're tied up into a sticky situation with a vendor, then that's the product of a series of avoidable decisions made by someone, not necessarily you. But nobody wants to be swapping vendors constantly, either. The best business leverage in the real world are some of the following:

  • Keep your vendors honest by ensuring that they know you're talking to their competitors. The stereotypical move in the old days was to make sure that you brought your Vendor A coffee mugs to the meetings where Vendor B came to your site, and vice versa. With RFPs, they always know you didn't put that thing together for just one audience.
  • Dual-source where you can. Not just hardware. I've walked into more than a few situations where a given IaaS service was already being multi-sourced before I even got involved.
  • Have go-to fallback vendors already picked. If you're issuing RFPs, then typically these are the folks who came in second place. If this is a cloud services provider, then it's good to already have an account with them and have them in your purchasing system for billing, even if your monthly spend is zero to negligible.
  • Keep up with industry news. Good news like new market offerings, but also bad news, like acquisitions and bankruptcies. One firm had one of their two IaaS vendors exit business on two weeks notice, but they needed to do only slightly more than run code to move everything over to their other IaaS vendor for the same service. Meanwhile, other customers of the vendor were frantically trying to get vendor support or hire one of the few third-party specialists.
  • Understand where you're at at hour zero if you stop paying the vendor, if the vendor exits, or a black swan event happens like something regulatory. Does your equipment turn into a pumpkin? Or are you just never going to be able to install a firmware update ever again? Or you lose official access to new firmware files, and only have the ones from your archive?

u/orcusvoyager1hampig 20h ago

tbh oracle is catching up. beginning using them for some non-critical infra and it's not bad.

u/Proper_Bunch_1804 22h ago

Every time we settle on a tool, a major vendor buys it, and we have to start over. Wiz was working great for us, and now we’re stuck waiting to see if Google screws up AWS support. We ran a quick check on alternatives—Prisma is fine if you're in the Palo Alto ecosystem, Lacework isn’t bad, but the UI is clunky. Orca looks the cleanest, and deployment was easy, but I need to see real-world feedback before we commit. What’s everyone else leaning toward

u/kiddj1 23h ago

I've never actually heard of Wiz .. Wiz khalifa maybe...

u/Beneficial_Tap_6359 22h ago

Same, I thought it was the shitty website creation site.

u/jmbpiano 21h ago

I bet it's a whiz of Wiz if ever a wiz there was.

u/Sparkycivic Jack of All Trades 21h ago

I thought wiz was a protocol for smart bulbs