We performed a comparison between AWS GuardDuty and Lacework based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison results: Based on the parameters we compared, Lacework comes out ahead of AWS GuardDuty. While AWS GuardDuty uses multi-log sourcing to use as input to analyze traffic, it lacks Lacework’s ability to integrate easily with services outside of AWS.
"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 way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."
"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."
"The solution provides AWS GuardDuty S3 protection, EKS runtime protection, and malware protection."
"The out-of-band malware detection from the EBS volumes. It's really cool. No agents or anything needed, it automatically finds and correlates based on malware."
"The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms."
"The correlation back end is the solution's most valuable feature."
"Since our environment is cloud based and accessible from the internet, we like the ability to check where the user has logged in from and what kind of API calls that user is doing."
"The compliance reports are definitely most valuable because they save time and are accurate. So, instead of relying on a human going through and checking or providing me with a report, I could just log into Lacework and see for myself."
"Polygraph compliance is a valuable feature. In our perspective, it delivers significant benefits. The clarity it offers, along with the ability to identify and address misconfigurations, is invaluable. When such issues arise, we promptly acknowledge and take action, effectively collaborating with our teams and the responsible parties for those assets. This enables us to promptly manage problems as soon as they arise."
"The best feature, in my opinion, is the ease of use."
"The most valuable feature is Lacework's ability to distill all the security and audit logs. I recommend it to my customers. Normally, when I consult for other customers that are getting into the cloud, we use native security tools. It's more of a rule-based engine."
"The most valuable aspects are identifying vulnerabilities—things that are out there that we aren't aware of—as well as finding what path of access attackers could use, and being able to see open SSL or S3 buckets and the like."
"For the most part, out-of-the-box, it tells you right away about the things you need to work on. I like the fact that it prioritizes alerts based on severity, so that you can focus your efforts on anything that would be critical/high first, moderate second, and work your way down, trying to continue to improve your security posture."
"Lacework is helping a lot in reducing the noise of the alerts. Usually, whenever you have a tool in place, you have a lot of noise in terms of alerts, but the time for an engineer to look into those alerts is limited. Lacework is helping us to consolidate the information that we are getting from the agents and other sources. We are able to focus only on the things that matter, which is the most valuable thing for us. It saves time, and for investigations, we have the right context to take action."
"The most valuable feature, from a compliance perspective, is the ability to use Lacework as a platform for multiple compliance standards. We have to meet multiple standards like PCI, SOC 2, CIS, and whatever else is out there. The ability to have reports generated, per security standard, is one of the best features for me."
"The solution has to be integrated with new services that AWS adds like QuickSight, Managed Airflow, AppFlow and MWAA."
"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."
"Some of the pain points in Amazon GuardDuty was the cost. When compared to some of the other services, depending on how many we had to monitor, if we had a huge range of accounts, as our accounts increased, we had a cost factor that came into play. Sometimes there were issues, for example, with findings that came up, we wanted to add notes and there were issues back then where notes couldn't be entered properly. If we wanted to leave a note such as "Okay, we have assessed this and this is how we feel", or "This is a false positive", Amazon GuardDuty wasn't allowing us to do that. Even with the suppression of certain findings, there was some issue that we had faced at one time. Those were some of the pain points of the solution."
"For me, I would say just the presentation of findings, like the dashboards and other stuff, could be improved a bit."
"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."
"We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved."
"The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options."
"AWS GuardDuty needs to be more customer-oriented."
"Lacework has not reduced the number of alerts we get. We've actually had to add resources as a result of using it because the application requires a lot of people to understand it to get the value out of it properly."
"Its integrations with third-party SIEMs can be better. That is one of the things that we discussed with them."
"A feature that I have requested from them is the ability to sort alerts and policies based on a security framework. Right now, when you go into alerts, you have hundreds and hundreds of them that you have to manually pick. It would be useful to have categories for CIS Benchmark or SOC 2 and be able to display all the alerts and policies for one security framework."
"I would like to see a remote access assistance feature. And the threat-hunting platform could be better."
"The configuration and setup of alerts should be easier. They should make it easier to integrate with systems like Slack and Datadog. I didn't spend too much time on it, but to me, it wasn't as simple as the alerting that I've seen on other systems."
"Visibility is lacking, and both compliance-related metrics and IAM security control could be improved."
"The biggest thing I would like to see improved is for them to pursue and obtain a FedRAMP moderate authorization... I don't believe they have any immediate plans to get FedRAMP moderate authorized, which is a bit of a challenge for us because we can only use Lacework in our commercial environment."
"Lacework lacks remediation features, but I believe they're working on that. They're focused on the reporting aspect, but other features need to improve. They're also adding some compliance features, so it's not worth saying they need to get better at it."
AWS GuardDuty is ranked 4th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 19 reviews while Lacework is ranked 10th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 9 reviews. AWS GuardDuty is rated 8.2, while Lacework is rated 8.8. 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 Lacework writes "Makes us aware of vulnerabilities and provides a lot of data but it's not easily understood at first look". AWS GuardDuty is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, Wiz and Trend Vision One - Cloud Security, whereas Lacework is most compared with Wiz, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Snyk, Orca Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. See our AWS GuardDuty vs. Lacework report.
See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.
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