Aviatrix Blog 
As cloud environments scale and threats spread faster than ever, security teams are overwhelmed—not by lack of information, but by a lack of control. In our previous post, we unpacked the implications of Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz. Now, we’ll go deeper—showing how Wiz and Aviatrix combine to close the critical gap between knowing about risks and actually stopping them.
Clarifying the Language: What Do We Really Mean by “Runtime Security”?
There’s some variance in how terms like “runtime security” are used across the industry. For example, software analyst Francis Odum recently referred to Wiz as offering runtime capabilities—highlighting its ability to analyze running cloud environments for vulnerabilities. That’s accurate in one way.
But what Aviatrix brings is a different, critical aspect of runtime protection: real-time, inline enforcement. Think distributed firewalls, intelligent egress filtering, east-west segmentation across VPCs and VNets, and active threat response embedded in the data path. Aviatrix doesn’t just analyze the runtime environment—it actively defends it.
Wiz gives you context, prioritization, and visibility. Aviatrix gives you control, enforcement, and segmentation. Together, Wiz and Aviatrix offer an integrated security model that merges actionable intelligence with rapid response.
Wiz: Making Cloud Risk Actionable
Chris McHenry, Chief Product Officer at Aviatrix, said it well in a recent interview at the RSA conference: “What Wiz has done exceptionally well is helping organizations cut through the noise of thousands of security alerts and focus on what actually matters.”
Wiz excels in:
- Vulnerability context and prioritization – Not just flagging CVEs, but identifying if a vulnerable asset is publicly exposed or connected to sensitive data.
- Agentless scanning and graph-based analysis – Allowing lightning-fast insight into an organization’s entire cloud estate.
- Security posture management at scale – Giving teams a blueprint of what should be happening in their cloud infrastructure.
This helps teams answer: What matters right now? What’s exposed? What’s exploitable? And crucially: Where should we start?
Aviatrix: Enforcing Zero Trust in the Real World
Once security teams know what needs to be protected, Aviatrix ensures its protection.
While Wiz excels at identifying risks and misconfigurations across workloads, Aviatrix complements this by enforcing policies in real-time at the network layer — without requiring agents on every workload. Instead, Aviatrix uses a lightweight gateway per VPC or VNet, making it easier to scale enforcement across your cloud footprint.
This simplifies operations and dramatically reduces deployment overhead—while still enabling fine-grained security controls. These gateways provide inline packet tracing and deep network visibility, giving teams the insight and tools they need to diagnose issues, verify enforcement, and continuously improve posture. Aviatrix brings network-layer controls and visibility that CSP-native constructs alone can’t deliver.
Aviatrix runtime security includes features such as:
- Distributed Cloud Firewall – Applying L4-L7 security policies in the cloud network layer, without routing hairpins or centralized chokepoints.
- FQDN Filtering and DNS Control – Enforcing intelligent egress rules and stop data exfiltration attempts in real-time.
- Micro-Segmentation and Isolation – Enforcing least-privilege access across workloads, environments, and clouds, without complexity.
- Embedded Threat Visibility – Via ThreatIQ with ThreatGuard, teams gain deep, distributed threat telemetry and automated remediation options.
This is where zero trust principles become operational reality: never trust, always verify, and enforce least privilege—dynamically. To make zero trust a reality in cloud networking, Aviatrix goes beyond user authentication and endpoint security. We secure the network pathways between clouds, within a data center (east-west), and at every connection between or among apps; enforce network-level, identity-based policies; and use trust-based connectivity between services. Aviatrix’s dynamic enforcement turns Wiz’s comprehensive visibility, prioritization, and contextualization of threats into an active zero trust framework.
Zero Trust, Operationalized
The Aviatrix-Wiz integration directly supports key pillars from the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model:
- Network Segmentation: Wiz identifies workloads with excessive privileges or risky lateral exposure; Aviatrix enforces least-privilege access using SmartGroups, dynamically segmenting networks based on tags and attributes to stop lateral movement.
- Network Traffic Management: Wiz helps teams prioritize traffic control by identifying high-risk flows or misconfigurations; Aviatrix delivers centralized routing and policy enforcement, dynamically adjusting paths based on security context or threat intelligence.
- Traffic Encryption: Wiz highlights where sensitive data is stored or exposed, enabling targeted encryption strategies; Aviatrix ensures all inter-cloud and hybrid traffic is encrypted with FIPS 140-2 certified tunnels and high-performance IPsec, meeting compliance and performance demands.
- Network Resilience: Wiz provides continuous posture assessment to detect misconfigurations that could impact availability; Aviatrix ensures resilient, fault-tolerant multicloud connectivity with active-active designs, transit redundancy, and automated failover.
- Visibility and Analytics: Wiz delivers deep, real-time visibility into cloud risks, exposure, and attack paths; Aviatrix complements this with inline traffic telemetry via CoPilot, enabling real-time enforcement validation and proactive investigation.
Zero trust isn’t just a concept. With Aviatrix and Wiz, it becomes an everyday reality embedded in an architecture where trust is:
- Declared explicitly as code and policy
- Enforced across the network at every connection point
- Contextually aware of every identity, network, and workload
- Continuously verified in real time and every network path
- Comprehensively visible as a complete trust graph
How It Works: Real-Time Integration Between Wiz and Aviatrix
The synergy between Wiz and Aviatrix is both conceptual and operational. Wiz continuously scans the environment and identifies vulnerabilities or potential breaches. When a critical issue is detected, Wiz can trigger an alert via webhook API to Aviatrix.
In response, Aviatrix dynamically updates a centrally managed access control list (ACL), which is instantly pushed to all secure gateways across the environment. This ensures immediate, distributed enforcement to block malicious activity before it spreads.
Security teams can then leverage Aviatrix CoPilot to view real-time traffic flows across their multi-cloud environments, validating that unwanted actors are not traversing the network and that policy enforcement is working as intended.
Better Together: Why Wiz + Aviatrix Matters
- Wiz gives you the why and the where — why a risk matters, and where it is.
- Aviatrix takes action on these insights: containing a threat, segmenting it, and stopping lateral movement.
Security teams don’t need more tools—they need more outcomes. Pairing Wiz’s clarity with Aviatrix’s control creates a closed-loop security model:
- Discover risk
- Understand the exposure
- Enforce security policy
- Measure and respond
Together, they turn security signals into secure outcomes.
As cloud environments grow in scale and complexity, bridging visibility and enforcement is no longer optional. Wiz and Aviatrix are two sides of the same coin—working in tandem to simplify and secure cloud operations from day one, and every day after.
Ready to see how runtime security can evolve from alerts to action? Run a free Cloud Firewall Security Assessment. Discover risks, enforce zero trust policies, and stop lateral movement in real-time. Don’t just detect threats—defend against them.