The Visibility Challenge in Cloud Security
Modern organizations rely heavily on cloud infrastructure to run their applications, services, and operations. But as these environments grow across providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, the ability to monitor and secure every asset becomes increasingly difficult. Cloud resources are ephemeral by nature—spinning up and down in minutes, changing IP addresses, and often operating outside the scope of traditional IT oversight.
This complexity introduces not only risk but also inefficiency. Some estimates suggest that up to 30% of cloud spend is wasted[1], and forgotten assets contribute to this. And more importantly, 45% of data breaches now occur in cloud environments[2], with the vast majority stemming from a simple yet persistent issue: lack of visibility.
The integration between Censys Attack Surface Management (ASM) and Wiz addresses this challenge head-on. By combining Censys’s industry-leading external scanning capabilities with Wiz’s comprehensive cloud security platform, security teams can gain a unified, enriched view of their entire cloud environment, both what’s inside the perimeter and what’s exposed to the internet.
Why Cloud Visibility Still Slips Through the Cracks
Keeping tabs on cloud assets is a moving target. In traditional IT environments, asset inventories could remain accurate for weeks or months. But in the cloud, the velocity of change is staggering. An alert generated in the morning might point to an IP address or workload that no longer exists or has been reassigned by the afternoon.
This volatility isn’t just a problem for incident response; it also makes compliance and risk mitigation far more difficult. Security teams are expected to ensure adherence to frameworks like NIST, ISO 27001, or SOC 2, which require a clear understanding of what’s running and where it’s exposed. Yet in practice, visibility gaps persist, and attackers are adept at exploiting them.
Cloud cost is another factor that underscores the importance of visibility. Untracked assets continue consuming resources, draining budgets without delivering business value. Worse still, these forgotten systems can become soft targets, unpatched, unmonitored, and vulnerable.
The Power of the Censys + Wiz Integration
Wiz has quickly become a leading Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) by helping security teams continuously identify and remediate risks across their hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The integration between Censys ASM and Wiz provides a powerful way to bridge the gap between internal cloud risk awareness and external attack surface visibility.
Censys enriches the internet-facing cloud resource data from Wiz with its own scanning intelligence, probing across all 65,000+ ports to identify which cloud assets are exposed and how they’re configured. This enrichment adds context, such as identifying open ports, running services, and misconfigurations that could be exploited. This can help security teams close risky services, such as SSH or RDP, or remediate software vulnerabilities.
What makes this integration especially effective is the daily synchronization of data. Resources pulled from Wiz are updated every day, ensuring that security teams have a current, accurate picture of their cloud footprint, even as ephemeral IPs and instances come and go.
These imported resources don’t just sit in a list, they serve as seeds that trigger further exploration. Censys uses them to discover related assets across the internet, which may have originated from or be connected to the same cloud environments. This helps organizations uncover shadow infrastructure or otherwise unknown assets, extending visibility even further.
Going a Step Further: Cloud Connectors + Wiz
For organizations seeking the most comprehensive cloud visibility, pairing the Wiz integration with Censys Cloud Connectors unlocks even greater value. Censys Cloud Connectors ingest data from AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts every four hours, capturing asset-level changes in near real-time. Wiz complements this by contributing additional context every 24 hours through its Network Exposure analysis, identifying internet-facing cloud resources that pose heightened risk. Wiz also helps fill visibility gaps by pulling in other cloud service provider (CSP) assets that may not be captured by the direct connectors, ensuring broader, more holistic cloud coverage.
Together, these systems form a layered visibility strategy and allow for smarter prioritization. Censys ties it all together by applying continuous external scanning, helping security teams maintain clarity across fast-moving, cloud-native environments. Because Censys verifies that resources are actually exposed, teams can reduce time wasted on false positives tied to decommissioned or inaccessible assets. They can focus instead on what’s truly relevant and actionable.
Unified Visibility, Reduced Risk
As organizations continue to expand across cloud platforms, the need for unified, real-time visibility becomes non-negotiable. Blind spots in your cloud infrastructure don’t just lead to inefficiencies, they invite breaches.
The integration between Censys ASM and Wiz gives security teams the tools they need to stay ahead. By combining the internal insights of CNAPP with the external intelligence of Internet-wide scanning, teams gain a more complete picture of their cloud attack surface, and the context to defend it effectively.
To learn how this integration can elevate your cloud security strategy, explore Censys Attack Surface Management or request a demo.
