Cardinal Cloud Prepares to Add Wiz as a New Security Feature

For those managing accounts with Cardinal Cloud, the outlook is about to get even sunnier. Cardinal Cloud services will soon be configured to support a new security feature called Wiz.

The big idea: Wiz is a new cloud security management service that’s designed to help organizations and cloud account holders recognize, understand, and address cybersecurity risks quickly and easily.

Because Wiz can be used across all three of our Cardinal Cloud service providers—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure—it makes a great addition to our Cardinal Cloud security toolkit, along with Qualys and Crowdstrike.

What is Wiz exactly?

The Wiz service is an integration for cloud accounts that uses a modern approach to identify:

• Configuration errors
• Vulnerabilities
• Malware 
• Compliance issues 

How it works: Wiz securely connects to cloud accounts and uses read-only scanning to analyze resources, creating momentary snapshots for virtual machines and databases. That’s how it safely performs offline analysis without consuming potentially disruptive amounts of computing resources.  And it does all of this without any actual humans viewing any account data or files. Similarly to how antivirus or malware detection software works, resources are read by software to evaluate risk, review configurations, and identify malware.

Once Wiz is fully connected and available at Stanford, Cardinal Cloud users will be able to log into the Wiz console to view findings categorized by Stanford’s exposure to risk. Wiz displays results visually and with built-in guidance on how to take action and understand urgency.

When will Wiz be available? Is there a cost?

Over the next couple of weeks, the Information Security Office (ISO) will be configuring Cardinal Cloud accounts in all three major Cardinal Cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, and Azure). For Cardinal Cloud account managers and users, there is nothing to configure or install, and this update won’t disrupt running resources. 

ISO will also be applying tags and labels to associate cloud accounts with campus workgroups so that you only see your information (and not everyone else’s) after signing in to Wiz with single sign-on.

While there is no specific charge to use Wiz as a part of Cardinal Cloud, individual accounts will incur a small cost of a handful of pennies to one or two dollars each month for the momentary snapshots that Wiz creates.

For even more details on features and cost, be sure to check out the Wiz FAQs

How do I join Cardinal Cloud so I can use Wiz?

This built-in Wiz integration is only available for the Cardinal Cloud community, so if you haven’t already switched your standalone AWS, GCP, or Azure account to join Cardinal Cloud, what are you waiting for? Get discounts, convenience, and access to Wiz by joining your account to Cardinal Cloud.

Learn more

• Join the community on Slack to ask questions and learn more:
  • #cop-wiz
  • #cop-cloud
• Wiz 
• Wiz Frequently Asked Questions - FAQs