A Buyer’s Guide to Cloud Security Platform

A cloud security platform often brings innovation to an organization by providing insights, clarity, and visibility that didn't exist before. However, this creates a unique challenge as these projects are often positioned as innovation initiatives rather than just an “existing tools replacement”. This makes building a business case difficult, because you're not improving something broken, you're introducing something entirely new. And with that comes both new possibilities and new challenges.

Through multiple implementations and proof-of-value pilots, we've observed that organizations investing in cloud security platforms sometimes fail to achieve meaningful value. Across enterprise implementations, from small to large companies, we've seen the same mistakes repeated. In the best case scenario, a cloud security platform is implemented, operationalized, and democratized. In the worst case, it causes unwanted friction and is permanently rejected. This article outlines the most common pitfalls buyers encounter from an organizational perspective and provides practical advice on how to gain value.

This article is divided into three phases:

• Phase 1: Planning and Preparation covers the activities before purchase such as securing stakeholder buy-in and establishing budgets.

• Phase 2: Implementation addresses the technical challenges of deploying the platform.

• Phase 3: Operations and Scaling focuses on the ongoing challenges of running, optimizing, and adopting platform usage across the organization.

Phase 1: Planning and Preparation

1. Finding the right cloud security platform vendor

As organizations move to cloud services, the natural option is often to enable the default cloud security product from your cloud provider. This appears "painless" since the risk assessment and data processing agreements are already in place, and processes for management and cost are established. Yet this convenience comes at a cost. After a few months of using the native cloud tool, you might log in and see 3,000 open findings, 200 of them marked 'critical,' and realize nobody has touched the dashboard in six weeks.

Take Microsoft Defender for Cloud as an example. In my experience, Defender for Cloud generates alerts at scale but doesn't help you understand which ones matter. The interface buries critical findings alongside hundreds of low-priority recommendations. You often need Global Admin or Subscription Owner to remediate, which means security teams can identify problems but can't fix them without chasing down someone with higher privileges or from the DevOps team. For what it costs, the value-to-noise ratio is hard to justify.

When you start looking for alternatives, the journey can feel overwhelming. The cloud security market is saturated with buzzwords and is difficult to navigate. Many vendors also claim more than they can deliver. To add to this frustration, some vendors that were once world-class in one capability, for instance container scanning, have evolved into mediocre "all-in-one" platforms through multiple acquisitions, diluting their original strength into a platform.

The solution as a buyer is to test the product through a pilot. A pilot is often recommended to determine whether a product delivers on actual value. However, this process is time-consuming and requires significant commitment from multiple departments. It can be tempting to run several cloud security platform pilots in parallel to speed up evaluation. While this allows you to test multiple products simultaneously, it often prevents the organization from extracting full value from any single platform, as none are explored thoroughly enough to reveal their true capabilities.

How to Achieve Value

• Watch for previous acquisitions. Ask vendors which capabilities were built in-house versus acquired. Acquired features can have integration gaps, separate agents, or inconsistent UX. Request demos that show workflows across these boundaries.
• Validate with customer references. Speak to customers who've completed full implementations, not just pilots. Ask specifically about unexpected costs, resource requirements, and time to value.
• Design for realistic use cases. Identify 3-4 specific scenarios that represent real pain points for developers, platform engineers, and security teams. Examples:
  
  • "Reduce time to identify exposed secrets in production"
  • "Automate compliance evidence collection for SOC 2"
  • "Alert on privilege escalation paths in Azure environment"
• Test before buying. No matter how impressive the demo is, insist on a proof-of-value pilot in your actual environment with your actual teams. Requirements are important, but delivering business value is paramount.
• Avoid traditional procurement workflows. The cloud security domain changes fast. Traditional procurement workflows, with long requirements documents followed by compliance checks, often evaluate against outdated methods (e.g., must have ALL network logs when modern solutions use APIs). Instead, focus on testing new capabilities through a pilot to see if the product makes sense for your business right now.

2. Weak Stakeholder Engagement

Security teams can sometimes procure a cloud security platform without engaging the right stakeholders, hoping to showcase value upfront and gain leadership buy-in. However, this strategy sometimes backfires. Without broad stakeholder sponsorship, the project soon lacks the prioritization, funding, and organizational mandate it needs to succeed, causing adoption to stall and the entire initiative to fail, despite the value achieved from gaining visibility in the cloud infrastructure.

How to Achieve Value

• Ensure leadership buy-in before procurement. Typical sponsors include the CIO, CTO, CISO, or Head of IT and Infrastructure. Without executive sponsorship and buy-in, the project can be stopped at any time. This will also be important when you need someone who will remove roadblocks.
• Position it as a business enabler, not just a security tool. Highlight benefits that matter beyond security, like reducing developer time spent on bug fixes, improving detection and response times, cutting time spent on compliance gap analysis.

3. Unclear License Models

Cost is the language of the business and the first question anyone asks. A common pitfall when acquiring a cloud security platform is accurately estimating cost.

The common challenges related to cost are:

1. A gap in understanding of your own cloud infrastructure. This can stem from distributed cost models across teams, future cost prediction or shadow-IT.
2. Vendors using complex licensing models, sometimes based on loosely defined "workloads". E.g vendor A uses per workload vs. per account vs. per resource, vs vendor B using per active account vs. per resource. This makes comparing apples to apples difficult.

This creates a difficult dynamic. As a customer you're buying a cloud security platform to gain visibility as well as solve cost problems, but you need to understand your cloud costs first to estimate what the platform itself will cost. Without this visibility, organizations either underbudget or encounter unexpected costs mid-implementation.

Even if you have good insight into your cloud costs, it can be hard to translate into correct estimations. This is due to how some cloud security platforms calculate workloads in a different way than the cloud provider does. An example could be that GCP does not charge you for a container, but the cloud security platform does.

The license model could for example be:

💲

1 workload = 1 VM
1 workload = 5 function apps
1 workload = 100 Data Bucket scans

As a customer you want to ensure that you pay as you go for the resources you need. Lack of clarity on costs makes it difficult to make good predictions. Cost is the language of business, and with unclear cost expectations it can be hard to get buy-in. Even worse, some vendors don't allow cost adjustments true-down. So if you discover you can eliminate old, unwanted workloads to reduce spend, you're locked into higher pricing. This inflexibility makes it challenging to right-size your costs once implementation begins.

How to Achieve Value

• Request precise pricing definitions and concrete examples during evaluation. Have an overview of your own workloads before the conversation, and consider getting cost estimates based on similar customers. Have a discussion with the vendor on true-down.
• Analyze current costs and look for consolidation opportunities. Can this platform replace tools you're already paying for? When building a business case, do an analysis of the current costs, and see if it’s possible to consolidate tools.
• Model projected consumption against your current and future cloud footprint. Watch for large migrations (ERP to cloud, lift and shift, new landing zone etc.) that could drive costs up unexpectedly.
• Present cost internally as a range, not a fixed number.
• Use read-only discovery scripts. Many platforms offer these to estimate pricing. The most accurate numbers come after a pilot, but these scripts give you a good starting point.

Phase 2: Implementation

4. Underestimating Resource Requirements

During pilot implementation, it's important to find the right people with the right access. This means ensuring that the individuals performing the integrations are available and have time for troubleshooting. A common pitfall is that the global IT operations administrator may not be available to perform integrations during that day, or a change request has not been approved prior to implementation. Deploying a cloud security platform is rarely plug-and-play. False positives, configuration tuning, and policy creation all require time and expertise. Organizations that lack dedicated resources quickly encounter adoption fatigue and the product becomes "just another expensive dashboard”.

Another common mistake is to reduce the scoping during a pilot. It can be tempting to reduce the scope to just a few resources. Although a generally smart idea, due to risk reduction, it might not give the full view of what a cloud security product can do for you. The power of a cloud security platform is not only in the workloads, but in the relationship between them.

How to Achieve Value

• Run one thorough pilot, not multiple shallow ones. A deep evaluation over 2-6 weeks reveals more than three parallel 2-week sprints. As a customer you need time to integrate, tune, adopt and operationalize. Each pilot requires security team bandwidth, cloud engineering time, and access to production or production-like environments. Many teams in the organization already have intense backlogs, so being mindful of the current workload is really important to properly evaluate the product.
• Define clear roles and responsibilities before you start. Who owns the platform? Who owns change processes? How does this align with existing change management? Document this explicitly. A good place to start is by asking vendors about typical staffing requirements for organizations your size.
• Ensure the right people have the right permissions. This includes developers, GRC, platform engineers, and security champions. Permission gaps cause delays that kill momentum, which is crucial for a pilot.
• Plan for adoption, not just deployment. A cloud security platform will be used by non-security teams with security responsibilities. This can be a GRC team, team leads, product owners. User adoption and change management matter as much as technical configuration.
• Build a handover phase into any external engagement. If consultants drive the implementation, require explicit enablement of internal teams before the engagement ends. Define who owns what, and make sure those internal teams have allocated time.
• Scope the pilot to represent your actual environment. Ensure the correct scope for the product. To gain full value from a pilot, it’s important to have a scope that is reflective of what the actual product can do. This means testing different workloads such as databases, functions, VMs, containers to ensure that the visibility is good across different technologies.

5. Technical Integration Overload

As a cloud security platform brings innovation through visibility, the excitement of achieving quick results can sometimes take over. This causes customers to underestimate the effort required to integrate a cloud security platform into the current infrastructure such as CI/CD pipelines, orchestration platforms, developer workflows, and existing technical debt. There's no such thing as plug-and-play, even though "the plug" has become easier to integrate.

How to Achieve Value

• Start with high-value integrations that prove the remediation workflow. Priority order:
  
  1. Connect to your most important workloads first. VMs, containers, anything publicly facing with critical assets should be prioritized.
  2. CI/CD pipeline integration to catch issues before production
  3. Ticketing system integration (Jira, ServiceNow) to validate that findings actually reach the people who fix them
• Perform a risk assessment before connecting production-critical infrastructure. If possible, deploy scripts and integrations using infrastructure as code so the changes can be disabled cleanly if something breaks or if you need to exit a pilot without extensive manual rollback.
• Don't let your proof of concept become production. Be strict about redeploying with proper documentation, maintenance plans, and clear ownership. Assign platform or DevSecOps teams to own integrations long-term.
• Focus on actionable insights, not coverage percentages. A pilot that finds three critical attack paths you can actually fix is more valuable than one that achieves 100% MITRE ATT&CK coverage but overwhelms you with noise.

Phase 3: Operations and Scaling

6. Ownership Gaps and Capability Sprawl

While integrating the cloud security platform can be complex, the harder challenge is often horizontal integration across teams. Cloud security responsibilities are distributed by design, from the security team to DevOps, platform engineering, and application teams. This fragmentation creates unclear ownership and slows adoption.

A cloud security platform bundles many capabilities. Agent and agentless scanning, runtime protection, posture management, entitlement management, and more. Without clear ownership, features go unused and accountability is lost. It's critical to understand which capabilities you're paying for and what the expected value is. A massive shift in capabilities requires a deep understanding of the current state, but gaining that understanding is what most customers are trying to achieve.

Meanwhile, organizations face constant pressure to deliver features, fix bugs, and meet stakeholder demands. This makes it difficult on a management level to justify allocating team capacity to a 'new product'. Unless platform adoption is presented as a shared, cross-functional initiative with clear business value, a cloud security platform risks becoming "just another tool we got, but never used."

How to Achieve Value

• Map your current gaps before buying. What specific problems are you solving? Compliance automation? Runtime protection? Attack path analysis? Performing a gap analysis of current capabilities creates a structured approach to present to the business what problems you're solving.
• Define which teams own which challenges and expected outcomes. Clearly define which teams (security, DevOps, developer teams, platform engineering, executive) own which challenges and what the expected outcome is.
• Ensure teams have management-approved time to fix issues. Otherwise, security raises findings that nobody addresses, creating friction between teams.
• Have dedicated resources from each relevant team during the pilot. This ensures follow-up and builds cross-team investment in success.
• Focus on capabilities you can realistically operationalize today. Treat additional modules as future rollouts, not immediate requirements. Scope creep kills projects.
• Set clear success criteria. What does "success" look like? Define it upfront so you can measure progress and maintain accountability.

7. Mishandling Critical Findings

Cloud security platforms are good at highlighting contextual risks such as an exposed asset that provides a path into privileged workloads. In both implementations I've worked on, we discovered visibility and context that showed how an attacker could potentially get into the infrastructure, with evidence from start to finish. This clarity can be overwhelming. When critical findings get pushed to already-stressed teams without preparation, the result is organizational chaos. Worse, if you escalate directly to leadership before giving teams a chance to respond, you create blame instead of collaboration.

How to Achieve Value

• Inform the people who can fix it first. The teams that own the affected systems should hear about findings before leadership does. Give them context and clear remediation steps. When you finally present to leadership, frame it as a demonstration of improved collaboration and capability, e.g "We found this threat, the team fixed it, here's our new process". Build a good story, not a blame report.
• Establish a triage process before enabling critical alerts. Know who reviews the alerts, and how urgency is determined.
• If platform engineering is leading this project, ensure your SOC and incident response teams are in the loop. They need to know the platform exists and what it surfaces. If you use an MDR vendor, inform them as well so they can help remediate the threat.

8. The Pilot Went Really Well, What Now?

After a successful pilot, the product can generate strong traction across teams. A critical step is using the momentum gained during implementation to ensure continuous improvement. Like any new tool, it requires workshops and user feedback. This is mission-critical, especially for tools with use cases beyond the security team.

How to Achieve Value

• Don't expect the product to work on its own. The “magic” is in active management, and it is required indefinitely. Even with AI. Democratize the solution in a meaningful way, identify which teams benefit and how. Focus on business value and adoption, over connecting new log sources.
• Interview different teams to find use cases based on their needs. A cloud security platform brings value beyond security. Compliance teams can speed up audits. Platform teams can identify resources to decommission. Finance can get better cost visibility. Find these use cases and build champions in each area.
• Maintain momentum through quick wins. Identify low-effort, high-visibility improvements that demonstrate ongoing value and keep teams engaged.

Conclusion

Gaining better visibility into your cloud environment is an important step in understanding and improving your infrastructure security. As many security vendors shift toward a cloud security platform strategy, it's important to understand as a customer which capabilities you are paying for and what the expected value is.

Cloud security is not entirely a cybersecurity challenge alone; it's an enterprise architecture challenge. In other words, it's a complex organizational problem involving many parts. When buying a cloud security platform, remember what problem you're trying to solve. This can be:

• Increased visibility in cloud infrastructure and synthesis of attack paths
• Reduction in time spent on compliance and running manual security scripts
• Protecting workloads from a single source

Buying a platform is not the same as implementing one. The difference is in organizational readiness combined with technology. Without clear ownership, stakeholder alignment, dedicated resources, and deliberate post-pilot planning, you end up with an overpriced vulnerability scanner that nobody looks at.

So the next time you're in a sales meeting, ask the vendor: "What do most of your customers fail at during implementation?"