List of the Top 8 Cloud Workload Protection Platforms for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in 2025

Panoptica simplifies the process of securing containers, APIs, and serverless functions while helping you manage your software bills of materials. It conducts thorough analyses of both internal and external APIs, assigns risk assessments, and provides feedback accordingly. The policies you implement dictate which API calls the gateway permits or blocks. As cloud-native architectures empower teams to develop and deploy software with remarkable speed to meet the demands of the contemporary market, this rapid pace introduces potential security vulnerabilities. Panoptica addresses these challenges by offering automated, policy-driven security and visibility throughout the entire software development lifecycle. With the rise of decentralized cloud-native architectures, the number of potential attack vectors has surged, heightening the risk of security incidents. Additionally, the evolving computing landscape has further amplified concerns regarding security breaches. Consequently, having a comprehensive security solution that safeguards every phase of an application's lifecycle, from development to runtime, is not just beneficial but vital for maintaining robust security standards. This holistic approach ensures that organizations can innovate without compromising their security posture.

Uptycs introduces an innovative platform that combines CNAPP and XDR capabilities, giving organizations the power to enhance their cybersecurity measures. With Uptycs, security teams can make informed decisions in real-time, leveraging structured telemetry and advanced analytics for improved threat management. The platform offers a comprehensive perspective of cloud and endpoint telemetry, equipping modern security professionals with crucial insights necessary to protect against evolving attack vectors in cloud-native environments. The Uptycs solution streamlines the response to various security challenges such as threats, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, data exposure, and compliance requirements through a single user interface and data model. It seamlessly integrates threat activities across both on-premises and cloud infrastructures, thereby fostering a more unified approach to enterprise security. Additionally, Uptycs provides an extensive array of functionalities, encompassing CNAPP, CWPP, CSPM, KSPM, CIEM, CDR, and XDR, ensuring that organizations have the tools they need to address their security concerns effectively. Elevate your security posture with Uptycs and stay ahead in the fight against cyber threats.

Prisma™ Cloud delivers comprehensive security throughout the entire development lifecycle for any cloud platform, allowing you to build cloud-native applications with assurance. As companies shift towards cloud solutions, the application development lifecycle experiences substantial changes, making security a vital focus. With the rise of cloud-native strategies, security and DevOps teams face an ever-growing number of components to protect. The fast-paced environment of cloud computing encourages developers to innovate and release updates quickly, while security teams are tasked with maintaining protection and compliance at every phase of the lifecycle. Feedback and experiences shared by our satisfied customers emphasize the standout security capabilities of Prisma Cloud. Such insights not only highlight the platform's effectiveness but also reinforce the necessity of implementing strong security protocols to keep pace with the continuous advancements in cloud application development. This collaborative effort between developers and security teams is essential to navigating the complexities of modern cloud environments successfully.

BMC Helix Cloud Security provides a streamlined approach to managing cloud security posture, specifically designed for various cloud environments. This innovative solution simplifies the challenges associated with ensuring security and compliance for both cloud resources and containers. It offers scoring and remediation tools for popular public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) options from leading providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. Users can take advantage of automated remediation processes that do not require any coding expertise, alongside comprehensive container configuration security for systems like Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and GKE. Moreover, its integration with IT Service Management (ITSM) facilitates automated ticketing enhancements, which boosts overall operational efficiency. This solution also comes with pre-defined policies tailored for CIS, PCI DSS, and GDPR, while allowing for the addition of custom policies as necessary. It further provides automated security management for cloud servers hosted on platforms like AWS EC2 and Microsoft Azure VMs. As the cloud environment evolves, BMC Helix Cloud Security aims to improve agility while ensuring that security and compliance requirements are consistently upheld. With its proactive checks and remediation features, this service effectively addresses the security challenges faced by AWS, Azure, and GCP IaaS and PaaS offerings, making it an essential tool for organizations navigating cloud security. Ultimately, it empowers businesses to focus on their core activities without compromising security.

Google Cloud's security and risk management solution provides valuable insights into your project management, resource oversight, and the ability to manage service accounts effectively. This platform is instrumental in identifying security misconfigurations and compliance concerns within your Google Cloud setup, offering practical recommendations to resolve these issues. Additionally, it helps you unearth potential threats to your resources through log analysis, leveraging Google's advanced threat intelligence and employing kernel-level instrumentation to detect possible container vulnerabilities. Moreover, you can keep track of your assets in near real-time across various services, including App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Cloud Identity and Access Management, and Google Kubernetes Engine. By examining historical discovery scans, you gain insights into any new, modified, or removed assets, which contributes to a thorough understanding of your security posture. Furthermore, the platform also identifies common web application vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting and outdated libraries, thereby strengthening your security measures. This proactive stance not only protects your assets but also facilitates compliance in a constantly changing digital environment, ultimately ensuring that your cloud infrastructure remains resilient against emerging threats. With continuous monitoring and robust analytics, you can stay one step ahead of potential security challenges.

Ensuring robust security across the complete lifecycle of containerized and serverless applications, from the CI/CD pipeline to operational settings, is crucial for organizations. Aqua provides flexible deployment options, allowing for on-premises or cloud-based solutions tailored to diverse requirements. The primary objective is to prevent security breaches proactively while also being able to manage them effectively when they arise. The Aqua Security Team Nautilus is focused on detecting new threats and attacks specifically targeting the cloud-native ecosystem. By exploring novel cloud security issues, our team strives to create cutting-edge strategies and tools that enable businesses to defend against cloud-native threats. Aqua protects applications throughout the journey from development to production, encompassing VMs, containers, and serverless workloads across the entire technology spectrum. With security automation integrated into the process, software can be released and updated swiftly to keep pace with the demands of DevOps methodologies. Early identification of vulnerabilities and malware facilitates quick remediation, ensuring that only secure artifacts progress through the CI/CD pipeline. Additionally, safeguarding cloud-native applications requires minimizing their attack surfaces and pinpointing vulnerabilities, hidden secrets, and other security challenges during development, ultimately creating a more secure environment for software deployment. This proactive approach not only enhances security but also fosters trust among users and stakeholders alike.

Sonrai's cloud security platform focuses on identity and data protection across major platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. It provides a comprehensive risk model that tracks activities and data movement across various cloud accounts and providers. Users can uncover all relationships between identities, roles, and compute instances, allowing for enhanced visibility into permissions and access. Our critical resource monitor keeps a vigilant eye on essential data stored in object storage solutions like AWS S3 and Azure Blob, as well as in database services such as CosmosDB, DynamoDB, and RDS. We ensure that privacy and compliance controls are consistently upheld across multiple cloud environments and third-party data storage solutions. Additionally, all resolutions are systematically coordinated with the corresponding DevSecOps teams to ensure a streamlined security posture. This integrated approach empowers organizations to manage their cloud security effectively and respond to potential threats proactively.

StackRox uniquely provides a comprehensive perspective on your cloud-native ecosystem, encompassing aspects ranging from images and container registries to the intricacies of Kubernetes deployment configurations and container runtime behaviors. Its seamless integration with Kubernetes allows for insights that are specifically designed for deployments, offering security and DevOps teams an in-depth understanding of their cloud-native infrastructures, which includes images, containers, pods, namespaces, clusters, and their configurations. This enables users to quickly identify potential vulnerabilities, assess compliance levels, and monitor any unusual traffic patterns that may arise. Each overview not only highlights key areas but also invites users to explore further into the details. Additionally, StackRox streamlines the identification and examination of container images within your environment, owing to its native integrations and compatibility with nearly all image registries, establishing itself as an indispensable resource for upholding both security and operational efficiency. This comprehensive approach ensures that organizations can proactively manage their cloud-native environments with confidence.