Qualys TotalCloud

My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is regarding the cloud visibility that we were not having previously.

Previously, we were just looking at critical vulnerabilities and patching them. Now with Qualys TotalCloud, we can distinguish between critical vulnerabilities and what is internet-facing, what is a sensitive workload, and excessive permissions that are given to unauthorized users in the cloud environment. This gives us more visibility towards what is happening in the cloud.

Another use case I have for Qualys TotalCloud is identifying misconfigurations within the cloud environment and how any configurations might impact the organization's cloud assets. Those were the two main use cases.

The integration with Qualys TotalCloud worked very well with tools such as Exonius and Splunk, wherein we were easily getting automated alerts and incidents that we could automate into emails and reach out to stakeholders without manual intervention.

Qualys TotalCloud is definitely helpful for our vulnerability management. It did help in CSPM and also in looking at cloud inventory, not just when a vulnerability or misconfiguration is happening, but I could look at what is happening in my cloud environment, who is really having any entitlements, what access exists, what unauthorized access anyone has, and so on.

Qualys TotalCloud does provide both IaaS and SaaS when it comes to threat assessment.

EASM finds assets that are exposed to the internet such as domains, IPs, applications, and services. When it comes to SaaS, it assesses the SaaS applications and their security posture. We could also look at what SaaS services we are using and what risks they introduce.

We were narrowing the risk and threat down to a much smaller group of assets where multiple factors came together. For example, a highly vulnerable asset that was internet-facing and business-critical had additional exposure of configuration issues. We used those insights to prioritize the assets for immediate remediation.

Qualys TotalCloud is a one security platform where we could leverage the existing Qualys platform and not any other different agent or different platform for cloud visibility and cloud security. We had multi-cloud visibility where both AWS and Azure could be controlled and monitored for misconfigurations and security issues.

We had better integration with tools, which is where Qualys TotalCloud was useful.

TruRisk insights have been useful in helping us move from a traditional vulnerability counting approach to a risk-based approach.

In terms of improvement, remediation still belongs to the cloud team, which is one of the issues we faced with Qualys TotalCloud. Qualys TotalCloud can identify the problem, but changing an AWS security group still requires the appropriate cloud owner or process. If there was also a response capability within Qualys TotalCloud in addition to detection, that would have been better.

The CNAPP capability is a major feature of Qualys TotalCloud, but when you drill down, there are a lot of modules that you need to enable. I think organizations need to know which modules they need for their use case and for their cloud environment usage. This gives the exact implementation strategy as well.

I have been using Qualys TotalCloud for one year.

Qualys TotalCloud is stable.

It is pretty scalable in our organization.

From what I have experienced, I have had interactions with them a couple of times and it turned out to be good. I would give a nine out of ten.

I would give Qualys TotalCloud an eight out of ten rating. The remaining two points I would take out due to the improvements I have mentioned.

The biggest strengths of Qualys TotalCloud are that it is pretty good at cloud visibility, has easy integration, and also has multi-cloud compatibility.

I would probably do a traditional CVE-based approach otherwise. A large number of vulnerabilities can be classified as critical or high, but treating all of them with the same priority is not practical.

Qualys TotalCloud compares well because it combines breadth and integration. I am pretty sure VMDR gives strong vulnerability visibility. But when we want visibility for the cloud environment, that is where Qualys TotalCloud comes into the picture. The biggest advantage is correlating the findings that we receive from these security tools and through the risk prioritization and managing the entire cloud ecosystem.

I primarily use Qualys TotalCloud for Cloud Security Posture Management, vulnerability management, asset visibility, and continual monitoring of cloud assets, maintaining the cloud resources that we use.

One of the main advantages for us is having multiple security capabilities available through this tool, instead of maintaining several completely separate tools for each one of them, such as vulnerability management, audit asset visibility, and cloud security management.

During our security rehearsal or weekly customer meetings, we need to check about site compliance, and Qualys TotalCloud was very helpful because instead of using other tools where we had to pull reports from different sources, we could check compliance all in one place.

When one hundred fifty vulnerabilities were identified on cloud, production, or any endpoint, it was useful for us to identify which asset was affected and to look at the details and share the findings with the customer and the remediation infrastructure team.

Qualys TotalCloud offers several valuable features, including monitoring visibility as an EDR tool and cloud asset inventory capabilities, which help in centralized asset management and prioritizing risk.

It is particularly useful because it gives us visibility across cloud resources from different environments in one place, making it easy for organizations to understand their security postures without manual checking with cloud consoles.

The vulnerability management capabilities are another strong point where we can review security risks for vulnerabilities on cloud workloads and prioritize issues based on CVSS scores.

When we were using different cloud solutions, it was tedious to find compliance for assets, especially during monthly meetings.

Qualys TotalCloud is very useful in day-to-day security operations, particularly at monthly review meetings. It was helpful to maintain all the assets in one place, and when investigating vulnerabilities, we can first identify affected cloud assets from the inventory and look at their release details and security findings which helps in understanding the actual scope of an issue and identifying which team needs to take action.

I believe it saves us more time because we do not have to gather asset information from different sources and tools. We can search and filter inventory, group assets, and use asset context to move quickly from understanding what an asset is to identifying required security patches.

Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our organization by helping us save time and manage all assets and remediation, allowing us to achieve quarterly and half-yearly goals.

It has improved our visibility and made vulnerability management more structured, helping us reach our remediation goals while reducing manual effort from security reporting and patch management.

Before implementing Qualys TotalCloud, we used to have around ten thousand vulnerabilities on critical servers, and after using it, we reduced the vulnerabilities by thirty to forty percent in just two months.

We could identify vulnerabilities and their affected assets within five to ten minutes. This has also improved our investigation efficiency, allowing the team to spend more time on actual remediation rather than data collection.

Regarding improvements to Qualys TotalCloud, I suggest that user navigation can be enhanced because initially, many users found it complicated and had trouble understanding the platform due to information being spread across multiple tabs.

Making some dashboards and reports customizable would also help, as different teams have their own requirements.

I have covered most of the necessary improvements regarding navigation and customizable dashboards, which would help make work easier.

I have been working as a SOC analyst for almost three years.

Most recommendations and findings are accurate and reliable. While the AI output is helpful, it is crucial to validate actions against actual safety configurations, as human intelligence is still necessary in decision-making.

My advice for others considering using Qualys TotalCloud is that if you want all vulnerability management and cloud asset management in one place, then it is the best solution. Good configuration makes finding vulnerabilities and managing alerts much easier.

My overall rating for this product is nine out of ten.

My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is vulnerability management and exposure management. I use this tool to evaluate the exposure risk of the environment and identify all the weaknesses present in the environment.

I depend heavily on the reports that I have from this tool. In fact, this is the main tool that I use for reporting in the environment across most of the customer environments. However, I encounter a lot of false positives that require extensive testing to ensure the tool is reporting accurately. This process takes a significant amount of time. Additionally, the number of possible vulnerabilities that the tool identifies is not comparable to other players on the market. This impacts my ability to deliver the exact exposure view or risk that I am looking for.

To be totally honest, I do not have any best features because I have had a bad experience using this tool, especially regarding vulnerability management and exposure management.

Getting all the information together in the tool is challenging. When I try to reach out to the support teams to get help and feedback to understand how the tool works in greater depth, the quality of support and knowledge of the people who work on the support team, as well as the supposed senior engineers, has not been satisfactory.

I spend a lot of time doing reviews because I perform a mix of agent scans and authenticated scans. Sometimes the merge of data between those two scans does not work properly, resulting in a lot of false positives that require manual validation. I spend considerable time reviewing the content that comes from the tool. I do not have one hundred percent confidence that I am getting the real output from the tool.

First of all, I believe that the support team needs to be more senior and not engage in robotic interactions with customers. Additionally, regarding feature requests and issues that I am working on with the support team, I see a lack of care from the support team in dealing with those issues.

To be honest, I would move out from this tool because it does not give a full view of vulnerability. It does not provide a full perspective of the risk to my environment or the possible ways that I would be exploited by a hacker. It does not give me a full perspective of the exposure view for vulnerability management. If I consider the cloud aspects, I also need to get insights from other modules from the tool to give me a full perspective of my risk in the environment.

I have been using Qualys TotalCloud for four years.

To me and my perspective, it is too hard to get what I am looking for and build reports from the tool to get the visibility and view that I need. Most of the time I need to export the data and use it in another third-party tool, such as Power BI, to get the visibility and view that I am looking for.

Regarding Qualys TotalCloud's AI capabilities, I do see that it is not true AI. It feels to me that I am working with a chat that does not give insights based on the findings or the information that I get from the tool. It is not a real agentic AI. It is more a chatbot.

Qualys TotalCloud is deployed in my organization as a public cloud.

My overall review rating for Qualys TotalCloud is seven out of ten.