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AWS GuardDuty vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 12, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (11th), Container Security (11th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (1st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th)
AWS GuardDuty
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (7th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS GuardDuty is 10.4%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.1%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS GuardDuty10.4%
Qualys TotalCloud1.5%
Cisco Secure Workload2.1%
Other86.0%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

RO
IT Security Expert at Alior Bank S.A.
Unified risk scoring has improved our cloud visibility and simplifies remediation priorities
Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IAS and SaaS. This solution provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce the work I would have to do. We are no longer based on CVSS; we are based on Qualys risk scoring, which is based on CVSS plus internal findings made by Qualys, and then assigns its own score. The TruRisk insight feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores, though I am cautious since some information is classified. Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution.
SK
Senior IT Auditor at Ernst & Young
Has provided automated threat detection and daily malicious activity insights while supporting seamless orchestration with existing dashboards
I would assess the integration of AWS GuardDuty with Threat Intelligence as majorly positive; no threat intelligence is 100% accurate, and there are a few false positives, but as a security engineer, this must be accepted, and overall, the response and service is good for us. We do not directly use AWS GuardDuty dashboard by itself, as we have our own integrated security dashboard; AWS GuardDuty gives the feed to that dashboard, and it's giving us a satisfactory view of how the security landscape looks. We use metrics such as zero-day threats, any malicious traffic, and any traffic which originates from OFAC countries to measure its effectiveness, as we are majorly into a financial institution, as any traffic that is from a malicious IP or a rogue device. I don't see any significant negative points regarding AWS GuardDuty; it's a good product to have if you're a cloud consumer. I rate AWS GuardDuty nine out of ten overall.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution."
"The most valuable feature is extensibility."
"Qualys TotalCloud is an excellent platform, and the beauty of the platform is that we can get all the vulnerabilities, see all the reports in a single dashboard, view them segregated, and easily learn about critical, high, and medium findings with appropriately provided remediation steps."
"One of the features I appreciate is the ability to generate daily reports without relying on anyone else."
"The most valuable feature is the consolidated information that it provides from various platforms."
"One of the most valuable features of Qualys TotalCloud is FlexScan, which is specifically for internet-facing VMs. We found this feature to be very useful. It was a key differentiator for us."
"I would rate Qualys TotalCloud ten out of ten."
"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable features are its security capabilities that help identify and mitigate risk factors."
"GuardDuty's comprehensive threat detection does not only monitor data - it also detects a wide range of security threats."
"What we found most valuable in Amazon GuardDuty is its threat detection feature, especially because we were monitoring a huge number of AWS accounts, so we needed a solution that would monitor for any kind of malicious activity."
"Amazon GuardDuty is a stable product."
"What I like most about Amazon GuardDuty is that you can monitor your AWS accounts across, but you don't have to pay the additional cost. You can get all your CloudTrail VPC flow logs and DNS logs all in one, and then you get the monitoring with that. A lot of times, if you had a separate tool on-premise, you would have to set up your DNS logs, so usually, Amazon GuardDuty helps with all your additional networking requirements, so I utilize it for continuous monitoring because you can't detect anything if you're not monitoring, and the solution fills that gap. If you don't do anything else first, you can deploy your firewall, and then you've got your Route 53 DNS and DNSSEC, but then Amazon GuardDuty fills that, and then you have audit requirements in AU that says, "Hey, what are your additional logs?", so you can just say, "Hey, we utilize Amazon GuardDuty." You're getting your CloudTrail, your VPC flow logs, and all your DNS logs, and those are your additional logs right there, so the solution meets a lot of requirements. Now, everything comes with a cost, but I also like that the solution also provides threat response and remediation. It's a pretty good product. I've just used it more for log analysis and that's where the value is at, the niche value. Once you do threat detection, it goes into a lot of other integrations you need to implement, so threat detection is only good as the integration, as the user that knows the tools itself, and the architecture and how it's all set up and the rules that you set within that."
"The way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."
"The correlation back end is the solution's most valuable feature."
"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."
"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."
"It's stable."
"Scalability is its most valuable feature."
"The product provides multiple-device integration."
"Scalability is its most valuable feature."
"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage; the telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent, it's complete, and you see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."
"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."
"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."
 

Cons

"TotalCloud could improve the classification of vulnerabilities. Specifically, it could enhance the categorization of what aspects fall under patches resolved by OS or software updates and what pertains to configuration adjustments."
"Qualys TotalCloud needs to enhance its scanning capabilities in the IP domain, as it currently lacks the functionality to resolve IPs to their corresponding domain names."
"The main area needing improvement is integration. Although the team is strengthening TotalCloud, integration can be enhanced with SIEM, SOAR, ITSM, and other sources."
"Although TotalCloud is a helpful tool, some of its advanced features are still under development."
"In my opinion, what can be improved in Qualys TotalCloud includes pricing and container scanning."
"There is a lack of data segregation according to criticality or inventory."
"Qualys TotalCloud's increasing complexity, due to the development and deployment of multiple solutions, is making the GUI difficult to navigate."
"TotalCloud could improve its scanning of niche devices like Wi-Fi dongles and USB modems because they are often untested. It covers everything else, like laptops, mobile devices, and Bluetooth IoT devices. They can improve on the small IoT devices because hackers and testers use these."
"Amazon GuardDuty could be better enriched in threat intelligence data."
"For me, I would say just the presentation of findings, like the dashboards and other stuff, could be improved a bit."
"Cost changes. It's very expensive. If you turn on every feature, it's more than most commercial vendors. For smaller orgs, that doesn't make sense."
"The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options."
"While sending the alerts to the email, they are not being patched; we have to do the patching and mapping manually."
"We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved."
"I would rate Amazon GuardDuty seven out of ten because some of the integrations may not work well with it, and depending on the integration that you're working with, the security tools have a lot of requirements to implement."
"I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use."
"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."
"A feature that I was looking for was emailed alerts and notifications so we'd get them right away."
"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."
"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."
"The problem is that we can only deploy the particular solution where we have the hardware with Cisco."
"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."
"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."
"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Qualys TotalCloud offers good pricing that is affordable and competitive with the market. Our partnership also provides us with additional benefits."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"Although Qualys TotalCloud is relatively expensive due to its unique automation features, its cost-effectiveness is rated an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable. It helps us to manage things with very few resources."
"The pricing is comparable. It is built into our other product, so I cannot piecemeal it. It is a part of our subscription."
"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."
"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."
"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 usage of this service, making it a recommended practice for security."
"I prefer to have something on demand for myself. That's why I haven't been paying for GuardDuty specifically. AWS provides a wide range of offerings, especially in the security area."
"The platform is inexpensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I have heard that the solution's price is quite high."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise28
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
Areas that need improvement in every solution include the remediation part. The remediation steps should be simple en...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
Our use case involves the assets that we have under cloud, the assets exposed to the internet, and the internal appli...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon GuardDuty?
AWS GuardDuty is an expensive feature, and while you can't expect the price to be low, it can be lower because it's p...
What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?
AWS GuardDuty is a good product; it's doing its job right now, and I don't see any additional improvements needed. Co...
What is your primary use case for Amazon GuardDuty?
We generally use AWS GuardDuty for detection of zero-day vulnerabilities and automatic threat responses; it serves as...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?
CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?
When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and cre...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
No data available
Cisco Tetration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,692 professionals have used our research since 2012.