AWS GuardDuty vs Illumio comparison

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8,899 views|7,503 comparisons
90% willing to recommend
Illumio Logo
3,936 views|3,001 comparisons
85% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 4, 2023

We performed a comparison between Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation and GuardDuty based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation offers sophisticated monitoring capability, automatic policy creation, log management, and visibility into application communication. AWS GuardDuty provides a unified platform for data collection and advanced threat detection. Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation has room for improvement in terms of OS support and agents for OT environments. AWS GuardDuty users suggest adding a mobile version and improving dashboard analytics. Users would also like to see improved threat intelligence and integration with new AWS services.

  • Service and Support: Some reviewers commended Illumio's support for their round-the-clock assistance and responsiveness. Other users said they were disappointed with unhelpful answers and delayed responses. AWS GuardDuty generally received praise for its outstanding support, which users characterized as fast and knowledgeable. A few users reported long wait times for phone support.

  • Ease of Deployment: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation has a lengthy deployment process that can potentially take up to six months, including testing. AWS GuardDuty is a cloud-based solution with a quick and painless setup process.

  • Pricing: Users have mentioned that Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is expensive overall, while AWS GuardDuty has a competitive pay-as-you-use pricing model. 

  • ROI: AWS GuardDuty users said it enhanced security and raised customer confidence, helping them to win new business. Our users have not yet provided ROI information about Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation.

Comparison Results: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is preferred over AWS GuardDuty. Illumio is praised for its micro-segmenting and monitoring abilities. The solution also provides solid visibility into application communication and network protocols. 

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. Illumio Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The correlation back end is the solution's most valuable feature.""It kinda just gives us another layer of security. So it does provide some sort of comfort that we do have something that is monitoring for abnormal behavior.""It is a highly scalable solution since it is a service by AWS. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.""One of the advantages of cloud services is the ability to use them on demand. There's minimal installation involved; you can check the latest offerings and make new deployments while dismantling the previous ones. This approach keeps you ahead of potential services, showcasing the agility of AWS.""The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms.""The product has automated protection powered by AI/ML, which is now far more powerful than before. It uses AI/ML in its detection algorithm, providing fast and quick results.""The solution will detect abnormalities in the AWS workload and alert us so that we can monitor and take action.""The way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."

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"The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging policies, which can be complex to devise. It's a matter that requires careful consideration and stakeholder involvement before implementing such policies.""The flexibility of the solution is its most valuable feature.""It has helped us to understand internal network visibility and firewall policy implementation. We use the product to simplify firewall policy implementation.""The solution is easy to use.""The solution helps to maintain logs and monitor activities. It also helps us with access management. The tool helps us to secure organizational data that include files.""The product provides visibility into how the applications communicate and how the network protocols are being used.""The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination.""The most valuable feature of Illumio Adaptive Security Platform is monitoring. When I have no requirement from the other application, I can use the web block traffic to build."

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Cons
"There is currently no consolidated dashboard for AWS GuardDuty. It would be helpful if they could provide a dashboard based on severity levels (high, medium, low) and offer insights account-wise, especially for users utilizing automation structures.""AWS GuardDuty needs to be more customer-oriented.""I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use.""For me, I would say just the presentation of findings, like the dashboards and other stuff, could be improved a bit.""We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved.""Because it's a threat detection service, they need to keep up with the various threat factors because new threat factors and attack factors come up all the time.""Improvement-wise, Amazon GuardDuty should have an overall dashboard analytics function so we could see what's in the current environment, and then in addition to that, provide best practices and recommendations, particularly to provide some type of observability, and then figure out the login side of it, based on our current environment, in terms of what we're not monitoring and what we should monitor. The solution should also give us a sample code configuration to implement that added feature or feature request. What I'd like to see in the next release of Amazon GuardDuty are more security analytics, reporting, and monitoring. They should provide recommendations and additional options that answer questions such as "Hey, what can we see in our environment?", "What should we implement within the environment?", What's recommended?" We know that cost will always be associated with that, but Amazon GuardDuty should show us the increased costs or decreased costs if we implement it or don't implement it, and that would be a good feature request, particularly with all products within AWS, just for cloud products in general because there are times features are implemented, but once they're deployed, they don't tell you about costs that would be generated along with those features. After features are deployed, there should a summary of the costs that would be generated, and projected based on current usage, so they would give us the option to figure out how long we're going to use those features and the option to keep those on or turn those off. If more services were like that, a lot more people would use those on the cloud.""The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options."

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"The solution is very basic and doesn't do anything other than the orchestration of layer four endpoint firewall rules.""I would like to see better data security in the product.""Illumio Adaptive Security Platform could improve by supporting more operating systems. For example, Cisco and Apache appliances.""Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial.""The product’s agents don't work very well in OT environments.""The customer service is lagging a bit. It could be better.""The interaction we've had with the support team hasn't been ideal. Technical support should be improved.""It requires a low-level re-architecting of the product."

More Illumio Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."
  • "I don't have all the details in terms of licensing for Amazon GuardDuty, but my organization does have a license set up for it."
  • "In terms of the costs associated with Amazon GuardDuty, it was $1 per GB from what I recall. Pricing was based on per gigabyte. For example, for the first five hundred gigabytes per month, it'll be $1 per GB, so it'll be $500. If your usage was greater, there's another bracket, for example, the next two thousand GB, then there's an add-on cost of 50 cents per GB. That's how Amazon GuardDuty pricing slowly goes up. I can't remember if there was any kind of additional cost apart from standard licensing for the solution. Nothing else that at least comes to mind. What the service was charging was worth it. That was one good thing when using Amazon GuardDuty because my company could be in a certain tier for a certain period. My company wasn't under a licensing model where it could overestimate its usage and under-utilize its usage and pay much more. This was what made the pricing model for Amazon GuardDuty better."
  • "Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."
  • "The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."
  • "On a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price, I rate the pricing a four or five, which is somewhere in the middle."
  • "GuardDuty only enables accounts in regions where you have an active workload. If there are places where you don't have an active workload, you wouldn't even enable them. That's one area where they could allow you to cut down your cost."
  • "The tool has no subscription charges."
  • More AWS GuardDuty Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "There is a subscription needed to use Illumio Adaptive Security Platform and we pay every three years. Overall the solution is expensive."
  • "The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis."
  • More Illumio Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavior or traffic patterns right away, which is great for staying on top of potential… more »
    Top Answer:80 percent of the customers are using AWS GuardDuty, and we recommend it due to its low cost, especially for small customers, ranging from five to ten dollars a month. In our policies, we enforce the… more »
    Top Answer:One improvement I would suggest for AWS GuardDuty is the ability to assign findings to specific users or groups, facilitating better communication and follow-up actions. It would be beneficial to have… more »
    Top Answer:The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging… more »
    Top Answer:The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis.
    Top Answer:Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial.
    Ranking
    Views
    8,899
    Comparisons
    7,503
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    644
    Rating
    8.1
    Views
    3,936
    Comparisons
    3,001
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    384
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Illumio Adaptive Security Platform, Illumio ASP
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon Guard Duty is a continuous cloud security monitoring service that consistently monitors and administers several data sources. These include AWS CloudTrail data events for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) audit logs, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) flow logs, DNS (Domain Name System) logs, S3 (Simple Cloud Storage), and AWS CloudTrail event logs.

    Amazon GuardDuty intuitively uses threat intelligence data - such as lists of malicious domains and IP addresses - and ML (machine learning) to quickly discover suspicious and problematic activity in a user's AWS ecosystem. Activities may include concerns such as interactions with malicious IP addresses or domains, exposed credentials usage, or changes and/or escalation of privileges.

    GuardDuty is able to easily determine problematic AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances delivering malware or mining bitcoin. It is also able to trace AWS account access history for evidence of destabilization. such as suspicious API calls resulting in changing password policies to minimize password strength or anomalous infrastructure deployments in new or different never-used regions.

    GuardDuty will continually alert users regarding their AWS environment status and will send the security discoveries to the GuardDuty dashboard or Amazon CloudWatch events for users to view.

    Users can access GuardDuty via:

    • AWS SDKs: Amazon provides users with several software development kits (SDKs) that are made up of libraries and sample code of numerous popular programming languages and platforms, such as Android, iOS, Java, .Net, Python, and Ruby. The SDKs make it easier to develop programmatic access to GuardDuty.

    • GuardDuty HTTPS API: This allows users to issue HTTPS requests directly to the service.

    • GuardDuty Console: This is a browser-based intuitive dashboard interface where users can access and use GuardDuty.

    Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

    Kubernetes protection is an optional add-on in Amazon GuardDuty. This tool is able to discover malicious behavior and possible destabilization of an organization's Kubernetes clusters inside of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

    When Amazon EKS is activated, GuardDuty will actively use various data sources to discover potential risks against Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes protection is enabled, GuardDuty uses optional data sources to detect threats against Kubernetes API.

    Kubernetes audit logs are a Kubernetes feature that captures historical API activity from applications, the control plane, users, and endpoints. GuardDuty collates these logs from Amazon EKS to create Kubernetes discoveries for the organization's Amazon EKS assets; there is no need to store or turn on the logs.

    As long as Kubernetes protection remains activated, GuardDuty will continuously dissect Kubernetes data sources from the Amazon EKS clusters to ensure no suspicious or anomalous behavior is taking place.

    Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Protection

    Amazon S3 allows Amazon GuardDuty to actively audit object-level API processes to discover possible security threats to data inside an organization's S3 buckets. GuardDuty continually audits risk to the organization’s S3 assets by carefully dissecting AWS CloudTrail management events and AWS CloudTrail S3 data events. These tools are continually auditing various CloudTrail management events for potential suspicious activities that affect S3 buckets, such as PutBucketReplication, DeleteBucket, ListBucket, and data events for S3 object-level API processes, such as PutObject, GetObject, ListObject, and DeleteObject.

    Reviews from Real Users

    The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms. Prior to using GuardDuty, we had multiple systems to collect data and put it in a centralized location so we could look into it. Now we don't need to do that anymore as GuardDuty does it for us.” - Arunkumar A., Information Security Manager at Tata Consultancy Services

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a cloud and data center security solution that helps stop breaches from spreading across hybrid and multi cloud IT environments. The solution is designed to stop ransomware, contain cyber attacks, and reduce risk. With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, users can understand relationships and communications to map exposure risk of systems and data, identify the right security posture and secure applications through least-privilege policies, and ensure a Zero Trust security posture.

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Features

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Scalability: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation scales up to 200,000 managed workloads or over 700,000 unmanaged workloads. These workloads can be in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid environments.
    • Single pane of visibility: The solution’s single pane of visibility improves your security posture and ability to prevent and respond rapidly to cyberattacks.
    • Simplicity: With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, setting up groups and tags is simple. The solution is easy to integrate with next-generation firewalls and can also integrate with IT service management tools to import workload tags to provide more context to workloads.
    • Ransomware containment: The solution provides enforcement boundaries to contain attackers from moving laterally across your organization, enabling security architects to immediately isolate any workload or endpoint compromised in an attack. Enforcement boundaries can be activated instantly through scripts or by manual control, isolating workloads and endpoints already infected from spreading across the organization.

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Visibility everywhere: The Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation solution helps ensure that every interaction on your network is accounted for. 
    • Least-privilege access: By implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, your organization can prevent unexpected breaches from propagating.
    • Adaptability and consistency: The solution guarantees consistent network behavior everywhere. 
    • Proactive posture: Using the solution enables your organization to always be on the lookout for an attack. 
    • Improve breach containment: With the solution, you can prevent unauthorized lateral movement and reduce your blast radius. Creating micro-perimeters around specific assets breaks up your attack surface and gives you the granular control needed to contain breaches.
    • Streamline policy management: The solution enables organizations to decouple segmentation from the underlying network to define policies based on the language that IT uses. Illumio's human-readable labels make policy creation much simpler and faster than traditional network segmentation approaches like VLANs, IP addresses, and port numbers.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Some of its major advantages are that it has a good auto policy writing feature, great mapping, and useful monitoring. 

    Shashi, Technical Consultant at a financial services firm, explains which features she really likes. “The auto policy writing is great. The feature will give you the option of inbound-outbound traffic. The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination. The illumination definitely stands out. Mapping is great. The application group mapping is useful.”

    The solution has “helpful support, useful monitoring, and high availability,” according to Edwin L., Security Architect at MGM.

    Sample Customers
    autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot
    Plantronics, NTT Innovation Institute Inc.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm43%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Media Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise67%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    AWS GuardDuty vs. Illumio
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Illumio and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    AWS GuardDuty is ranked 4th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 19 reviews while Illumio is ranked 14th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 8 reviews. AWS GuardDuty is rated 8.2, while Illumio is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS GuardDuty writes "A stellar threat-detection service that has helped bolster security against malicious threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Illumio writes "Pprevents attackers or threats from spreading or moving laterally". AWS GuardDuty is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, Wiz and Aqua Cloud Security Platform, whereas Illumio is most compared with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Zscaler Internet Access and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. See our AWS GuardDuty vs. Illumio report.

    See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.