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.

At the moment, the organization where I work, Alior Bank, is using Qualys TotalCloud, although in the past we used Nessus Professional, which we dropped about two years ago. It was Professional, not the enterprise Tenable version, just Nessus.

I have been familiar with Qualys TotalCloud from the beginning of the implementation in our bank, which was in 2024 when we purchased it and started implementing it. I am part of the implementation and current management of Qualys TotalCloud.

Regarding Kubernetes and containers, I don't recall if it's part of Qualys TotalCloud or a different component.

We are utilizing Azure and GCP with Qualys TotalCloud.

Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IAS and SaaS.

This solution provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce the work I would have to do. We are no longer based on CVSS; we are based on Qualys risk scoring, which is based on CVSS plus internal findings made by Qualys, and then assigns its own score.

The TruRisk insight feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores, though I am cautious since some information is classified.

Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution.

Improvements in Qualys TotalCloud could include technologies to cover compliance scanning, such as CIS benchmark scanning. It is somewhat difficult to set up Qualys TotalCloud properly for certain technologies. Additionally, while they moved to UI4, which is nicer, some parts of Qualys TotalCloud dashboards still look very old. You can switch between those interfaces and adopt them because some things are better in the new one, while others are not.

Overall, Qualys TotalCloud is a stable solution. I remember encountering a problem once, which was an issue for the whole EU2 platform and affected tenants on Qualys TotalCloud placed in EU2 areas. As I saw on the status page, it was only a problem in Europe, not in America or Asia.

Regarding technical support from Qualys, they respond, but the response time can be too long. Sometimes we need to wait weeks for solutions to simple questions.

If I had to rate Qualys support based on my experience from one to ten, I would say around six or weak seven, perhaps six plus.

It is difficult to compare the helpfulness of written explanations with other solutions as we used Nessus for a few years. We only had two or three years of experience with that support, and it was simply Nessus Professional and not Tenable Enterprise, so I could not make a comparison. However, currently we have very good support from our integrator, plus the support from Qualys itself.

Regarding deployment of Qualys TotalCloud, the installation of Cloud agents was given to administrators from each team who manage servers and workstations, including components in Azure or GCP cloud. This was not handled by me or my team, as I work in the cybersecurity department. We manage the use of Qualys TotalCloud, but installation is up to the administrators, and we provide them support.

Currently, in the cybersecurity department, we have two people involved in the deployment of Qualys TotalCloud, along with over one hundred administrators involved in implementing and installing agents on the machines.

The deployment of Qualys TotalCloud within our organization was a continuous process. However, the installation of Cloud agents on the machines took place within two to three months, about a quarter.

The benefits we see are related to cost reductions.

For a mid-size bank like ours, the licensing cost for Qualys TotalCloud is cheap. Tenable Enterprise costs double that of Qualys TotalCloud and Rapid7. We explored those three solutions and decided to go with Qualys TotalCloud.

Qualys TotalCloud provides written explanations to help guide remediation paths and eliminate cyber risks in our organization. I would rate this review an eight overall.

I am working with Qualys TotalCloud for vulnerability management, and the major use cases are patch management and scanning.

If I had to say something positive about the product that brings me the biggest benefit, I would say it has accurate reports, gets new update CVEs, zero-day attack detection, and is easy to manage with its GUI. Qualys TotalCloud does provide written explanations to help guide remediation paths and thus eliminate cyber risk. When it provides written explanations with guidance to remediate a path and eliminate cyber risk, it helps in general and helps a lot. The product does have a so-called TruRisk Insights feature, but I do not have experience with it. Qualys TotalCloud for vulnerability management provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IaaS and SaaS, and I think overall it helps with security posture management. It is very good for patching vulnerabilities and getting zero-day attacks with accurate reports, not like Nessus. With Nessus, if you start to scan, it gives you many vulnerabilities, but it is not accurate and shows old vulnerabilities. If you compare it with Qualys TotalCloud, it is accurate and has updated CVEs. It saves a lot of time.

If Qualys could add some new features to Qualys TotalCloud in future releases, the results for the report and remediation should be more clear and very straightforward. Once we export the report, sometimes we do not get the correct path to patching the vulnerability.

I have been working with the product for around two years, and in general, I have been in this domain with security products for around 12 or 13 years.

Qualys TotalCloud is stable.

Regarding scalability, I would rate it seven out of ten. The reason I rate it seven points, not ten points, is that it is not that easy to manage. The problem when I manage it basically is that you need someone who has some experience to manage it, as it is not user-friendly.

The technical support from Qualys is good, to be honest.

Apart from Tenable and Qualys, I did not work with any other competitors. I only worked with these two and OpenVAS, which is an open-source solution for vulnerability assessment.

The installation of Qualys TotalCloud is very straightforward, and you can easily install the agent for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

I cannot provide information about seeing ROI with Qualys TotalCloud.

The price is very expensive, actually.

If I compare Qualys TotalCloud with other vendors, I compare it with Nessus and Tenable. If I compare Qualys TotalCloud and Tenable, I would say Qualys TotalCloud is better in terms of functionality, and Tenable is better in terms of price.

We are using Qualys TotalCloud Vulnerability Management and web applications, enterprise solutions, plus Nessus also. For vulnerability management, we installed an agent for each machine and servers and start scanning to get the vulnerabilities.

If I speak about some negative sides of Qualys TotalCloud, I think the negative side is the license. It accounts for approximately 30 percent of the concerns.

Qualys TotalCloud provides container security, vulnerability management, posture management, and more.

Qualys TotalCloud saves about a third of resources. Qualys TotalCloud provides written explanations to guide remediation paths and eliminate cyber risk, and I appreciate the written explanation and the visualization of attack paths.

Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment for IaaS and SaaS. Qualys TotalCloud provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce my workload by not having to combine multiple sources.

In my opinion, what can be improved in Qualys TotalCloud includes pricing and container scanning.

I started working with Qualys TotalCloud approximately one year ago.

I assess Qualys TotalCloud as stable, and I would rate it an 8, with 10 being the best.

I would rate Qualys TotalCloud a 7 for scalability on a scale from 1 to 10.

I would rate the technical support for Qualys TotalCloud about a 7 on a scale from 1 to 10.

It is easy to deploy Qualys TotalCloud.

Qualys TotalCloud is on the pricier side, and I would rate the pricing around an 8 on a scale from 1 to 10.

I compare Qualys TotalCloud with other solutions and other vendors as a good contender, though I acknowledge there are differences. In comparison with other vendors, including Microsoft, Qualys TotalCloud holds its own but presents distinct features.

I do use the TruRisk Insight feature with Qualys TotalCloud. I assess the comprehensiveness and the range of risks found with TruRisk Insights as adequate.

The TruRisk Insights feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores. The effect of TruRisk Insights on security posture is significant, as it provides better awareness and focus on critical risks.

I would recommend this product to other users, and my advice would include doing a proof of concept to see if it fits their needs. I would rate this product an 8 overall.

I use Qualys TotalCloud for cloud security posture management across AWS and Google Cloud. I use this tool for compliance and other purposes. I scan AWS and Azure for S3 buckets, security groups, unencrypted databases, and generally for IAM roles. It helps in terms of securing the data. I also use CIS benchmarks as a standard for hardening cloud posture management. Qualys TotalCloud helps to ensure I am enforcing the CIS benchmarks automatically.

For the TrueRisk insights, it provides context-aware prioritization of findings, asset criticality, risk trends, and real-time exposures of risk parameters. It ensures I can make informed decisions with higher management.

FlexScan helps me run targeted, on-demand cloud security checks instead of waiting for full scheduled scans. It allows for immediate results on risky configurations or vulnerabilities after major configuration changes. I use it to validate checks post-scan.

TrueRisk Eliminates helps in lowering risks from the organization's context by comparing with global standards. Though not used extensively, it aids in reducing exposure ratings or ensuring compliance.

One of the valuable features of Qualys TotalCloud is its recurring scanning patterns, which detect misconfigurations, risky configurations, and weak IAM policies. The tool automates the maintenance of CIS benchmarks at scale, which is very useful. Qualys TotalCloud serves as a single-point tool integrating various modules such as VM and policy compliance and security, providing a holistic view of my security posture.

Qualys TotalCloud provides threat intelligence feeds or threat integration, enabling me to mix data with other modules to identify recurring vulnerabilities or threats I face in my organization.

From a downside perspective, the UI is not user-friendly and feels dated compared to other tools like Prisma Cloud. The navigation is difficult in terms of understanding risk relationships. Attack path analysis is another area needing improvement. It struggles to predict how attackers may move through phases. Automating remediation could also be improved, as many tasks remain manual. The lack of data load speed sometimes leads to system lags. Customizing reports based on business standards is cumbersome. Pricing is high compared to competitors.

Installation could be simplified with fewer integration issues. Documentation focused on detailed user cases with if and else scenarios would be beneficial.

I have been using Qualys TotalCloud for the past four years with different organizations. I have been with two organizations in the past four years and have been using it at both.

It happens not very often, but sometimes it does occur. In terms of stability, I could say Qualys TotalCloud operates at 95% of the time, and the rest 5% depends on how I manage it.

From a scalability standpoint, I could say it is 90% scalable. The remaining 10% presents a challenge that Qualys could address.

From a technical support perspective, those individuals are competent enough to provide information regarding the product. They offer level one support initially, escalating as needed. I rate them four out of five because they respond quickly if issues are marked as high priority. I would give them 8.5.

I used Prisma Cloud previously. Prisma Cloud has better navigation and UI compared to Qualys TotalCloud. However, I have taken a whole package of Qualys and tend to use it.

In terms of installation, it could be simplified compared to other tools due to its packaging and tooling. A lack of specific help articles and integration issues are present. From a security standpoint, it is good but requires time.

For one of the organizations, I partnered with Qualys as a team since I have large projects. They assisted with a global rollout.

Pricing compared to competitor tools is high. My costs depend on asset subscriptions. Pricing remains constant regardless of asset utilization, whereas other tools employ a credit system.

Prisma Cloud and similar tools have slight variations in flow but follow the same frameworks. Prisma Cloud offers user-friendly navigation that is better than Qualys TotalCloud.

From a technical support perspective, those individuals are competent enough to provide information regarding the product feel. They provide level one support first to understand better. If they cannot resolve the issue, they can escalate it to the next level and come on a call. However, it does not make sense for them to escalate if it is a medium or low priority issue; they address those according to their SLAs. From another perspective, there could be some downsides. In my opinion, this is the best tool. My overall review rating for Qualys TotalCloud is 8.