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CloudPassage is officially announcing new packaging and pricing options for its award-winning Halo cloud security platform, effective immediately.
These new options give more companies the ability to put Halo’s proven capabilities to work in a wider range of deployment scenarios with even better economics.
If you are an existing CloudPassage customer, contact your account manager or customer success representative to learn how you can take advantage of these opportunities.
This article will cover our new subscription offerings, the drivers for the changes, and the economic advantages of the Halo pricing model. Here is a summary with select links if you want to jump to a specific section.
As the first mover in cloud workload security, CloudPassage has maintained a unique perspective on how the market category has evolved. Public cloud computing adoption by mainstream and mid-size enterprises has been accelerating for some time. This trajectory has surged in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting shift to remote-working models.
The economic impacts of COVID-19 will not be short-lived. We’ve barely begun to understand how our day-to-day activities will change and how a completely new way of living and working will impact how businesses operate. And the pandemic itself has not run its course. In this fog of uncertainty, there are two tenets that have already been recognized broadly:
The surge in cloud adoption has driven a surge in our conversations with enterprise InfoSec leaders who are struggling. Most relate stories about being crushed by accelerated cloud security plans on top of existing security requirements—all while budgets and staff are being cut and attacks are on the rise.
The demands to get more done, faster, with less is an extremely intense set of constraints to meet. Security leaders and architects see the value of a unified, automated, rapidly deployable platform in times like this. But financial lock-down policies and personnel constraints leave them unable to move on a mission-critical solution.
We’ve heard you and understand your struggles. Here’s what we’re doing to help put enterprise-class cloud security automation in your hands.
We’ve heard chilling statements like this one quite a lot recently:
“My budget is extremely limited but I am terrified that our cloud environment has glaring holes… our business might not survive a compromise right now.”
There are a lot of reasons for this fear. Workloads are being shifted from datacenters to clouds rapidly to eliminate the need for physical plant and hardware management. Workloads already in the cloud are being moved between clouds to seek lower IaaS costs. Less expensive development and operations contractors are being onboarded quickly, which introduces risk. Product release schedules are being accelerated to drive more revenue. It’s a panicky environment. The opportunity for misconfigurations and other exposure is more significant in a “do more with less” environment unless you’re properly protected.
Halo Essentials is a new package that automates cloud workload risk awareness with a price point that is friendly to extreme budget constraints. It’s made to support teams with limited budgets who need to get the basics done quickly and easily in small to midsize cloud environments. Here are the numbers:
* Halo CSPM support for GCP is in progress and will be released in Q3 2020
Security and compliance posture assessment and monitoring for IaaS, server-based, and containerized environments in any mix of public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. Explicit remediation advice and ongoing security posture monitoring are included, and there are no hidden fees or extras to install or manage.
Learn more about Halo Essentials
Another discussion that’s coming up often starts out with something like this:
“I am being told that I have to consolidate products and I’m getting heavy pressure to go with the cheapest thing out there. I’m already dependent on automation and need more, but the cheap products don’t have strong automation…. that’s going to backfire big-time since I don’t have the personnel to fill the automation gap.”
InfoSec teams are being asked to make security tooling cheaper and easier. DevOps teams are under pressure too, and they want less to deal with—fewer agents, fewer static reports, a smaller toolset. Large-scale environments still need enterprise-class automation, scale, and flexibility but they’re under financial pressure as well.
We’ve reduced rates on Halo Enterprise to help large organizations get more and better cloud security automation in a single platform with fewer moving parts. Halo Enterprise has not been downscaled—it’s the same platform that top cloud enterprises have depended on for years. We’ve just found technical and operational efficiencies that enable us to offer better economics to our customers. Here are the numbers:
* Halo support for GCP is in progress and will be released in Q3 2020
Halo Enterprise still offers a broad range of cloud workload security automation that works in any public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud hosting environment with a single pane of glass. Capabilities include asset discovery and inventory, security assessment, ongoing security posture monitoring, threat detection, microsegmentation, and continuous compliance for IaaS, server-based, and containerized application environments.
Learn more about Halo Enterprise
Many security organizations simply can’t predict how many workloads of various types they will need, or have a fixed budget that they need to deploy and redeploy with flexibility:
“We have no idea how many cloud servers or containers we have today, and we expect those numbers to continue shifting. We’d rather set a monthly budget and use it fluidly as our needs dictate.”
Flex Licensing Subscriptions have you covered. In the Flex licensing model, your unit discounts are based on the volume of your fixed monthly budget. Use your discounted Halo service units each month however you need to, and they’re charged against your monthly pool of usage dollars. You can deploy Halo to new infrastructure, decommission old infrastructure, and even move licensing at will—and you don’t even need to contact us to do it. Flex Licensing allows you to stick to a fixed monthly budget, even if you can’t predict what’s coming.
Contact us to learn more about Flex Licensing Subscriptions
Some companies we’re talking with have the need for Halo right now, but absolutely cannot make a contractual commitment to a new vendor:
“I have some discretionary budget to go month-to-month but there’s no way procurement is going to let me sign a contract with a commitment to anything new.”
If you’re in this situation, you’re not alone. This situation is happening everywhere, and it’s frustrating to see a solution to a need that you can’t touch. We get it.
Halo Pay-as-you-Go (PAYG) subscriptions enable you to access Halo’s capabilities without a commitment. Available from the AWS Marketplace, subscriptions under the PAYG model allow you to pay for exactly the Halo security services that you use each month with no contractual commitment—cancel anytime without penalty or effort.
The AWS Marketplace private offer feature enables you to negotiate product pricing, terms, and conditions that are not listed by a vendor on the AWS Marketplace.
CloudPassage now supports procurement of Halo through private offers. CloudPassage creates a private offer based on agreed-upon pricing and terms, which appears in the AWS account that you designate. You accept the private offer and start receiving the negotiated price and terms of use.
In addition to making procurement simpler, this can be financially beneficial for enterprises that participate in the AWS Enterprise Agreement program. Under some AWS Enterprise Agreements, AWS customers receive discounts based on the total amount spent with AWS. Software purchased through the AWS Marketplace can provide credit towards achieving higher AWS spending levels and therefore higher AWS discounts.
Ask your procurement team if this opportunity exists in your enterprise and contact us to discuss a private offer for Halo through the AWS Marketplace.
Learn more about AWS Private Offers
Many companies we speak to recognize that once fully deployed, CloudPassage Halo requires little to no operational effort. The challenge is that they don’t even have the personnel bandwidth for initial Halo deployment:
“We need it, we want it, we know the automation will give our team relief… but we don’t even have time to set it up.”
We understand the conditions that teams are working under—reduced hours, furloughed team members, and even security teams being reassigned to non-security tasks.
Under normal circumstances, onboarding is provided for a fee—but today’s circumstances are far from normal. To help teams who need Halo up and running quickly, our customer success team will perform initial onboarding free of charge. This includes:
Many companies want to go beyond initial onboarding to gain deeper value from Halo’s automation capabilities. The challenge is again staffing—they just don’t have the bandwidth to engage.
We’re alleviating this challenge by providing all professional services at-cost for advanced Halo integrations like automatic issue routing, workflow tool integration (e.g. Jira, ServiceNow), and SIEM/GRC/SOAR integrations.
NOTE: Professional services projects will be scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis based on resource availability.
Contact us to learn more about free initial onboarding and at-cost professional services
Our new pricing and packaging options improve Halo’s value for investment on top of the existing economic advantages that are gained. The following are some key considerations for those not familiar with Halo’s existing economic benefits.
Many products bind licenses to factors like specific users, IP addresses, or specific IaaS accounts. Redeploying licenses with these products is often not permitted, even if the originally bound asset goes away. Products that do allow redeployment of licenses often have restrictions, require manual effort to deactivate and reactivate licenses, or even require that you contact the vendor to request changes. And very few products offer automatic on-demand licensing, discounted or not. These limitations result in lost budget dollars, plain and simple.
Halo is purely usage-based and all licensing is transparently portable. You can provision, deprovision, and move licensed services automatically. It’s simple—if you turn Halo on or off for an environment, the licensing takes care of itself. You don’t need to do anything extra, and you can see your usage at any time.
Halo’s usage-based subscription structures also have built-in volume discount tiers that apply to prepaid or “reserved” service units as well as on-demand service units. This enables you to pay for exactly what you need while maximizing discount opportunities and use discounted on-demand service to address variable requirements.
Some products charge based on bandwidth, data ingest and storage, scans run, or even each time a rule is evaluated. Others charge different prices based on the size of workloads or hosting environment. The list goes on. This makes it extremely hard to predict costs, leading to frequent budget overruns.
Halo’s licensing model is simple and transparent, which leads to predictability. We charge based on the number of IaaS accounts and workloads, period. Maximize your discounts by committing to the steady-state workloads you need, and use discounted on-demand services for variable needs like intermittent autoscaling or planned seasonal capacity changes.
Some products “nickel-and-dime” customers with extra fees for things that should be included, like compliance rules, API access, or single sign-on integration. Some also advertise as SaaS solutions, but actually require the deployment of additional infrastructure—often a lot of additional infrastructure—for scanning appliances, data aggregators, and similar requirements. Not only do these extras cost hard dollars for licensing and infrastructure, but they increase operational costs since they need to be operated and maintained.
Halo is a true all-inclusive SaaS solution that has no requirements that drive extra costs for you. Halo’s architecture does not need intermediate collectors to scale and API connectors are operated from the Halo cloud environment. Halo also does not charge extra for items like compliance analytics, ad-hoc scans, or API connectors.
Our goal with these sweeping changes is to make Halo’s powerful capabilities available to more companies and to help address the unprecedented challenges our industry is facing. We’re striving to deliver a superior, enterprise-class solution that’s unified, comprehensive, automated, and portable with even better economics and flexibility.
To learn more about CloudPassage and Halo, here are some helpful links:
