AWS GuardDuty vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.4, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. Additionally, 91% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 6, 2024

AWS GuardDuty and Microsoft Defender for Cloud both offer strong threat detection and automated responses, yet differ in setup time and integration. AWS GuardDuty features quick deployment and seamless integration with AWS services. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers continuous monitoring and superior integration with Microsoft tools, albeit having variable setup times.

Features: AWS GuardDuty excels in accurate threat detection, seamless integration with AWS, automated responses, and a user-friendly interface. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers comprehensive threat protection, automatic remediation, continuous monitoring, and strong integration with Microsoft tools.
Pricing and ROI: AWS GuardDuty setup cost is straightforward, dependent on data analyzed, and simple to initiate. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has competitive pricing, diverse licensing options, and flexible payment plans. AWS focuses on ease of onboarding, while Microsoft emphasizes budget accommodation and variety in licensing. AWS GuardDuty offers enhanced security through seamless AWS integration. Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides improved threat detection and visibility across cloud environments. GuardDuty reduces potential losses; Defender for Cloud saves on breach costs.
Room for Improvement: AWS GuardDuty requires better alert accuracy and streamlined integration, along with advanced customization options and improved documentation. Microsoft Defender for Cloud needs better third-party tool integration, advanced customization, enhanced user interface, and comprehensive reporting features.
Deployment and customer support: Establishing AWS GuardDuty is notably quicker, often completed in mere hours, whereas Microsoft Defender for Cloud varies considerably, with setup times ranging from one week to three months, reflecting a less predictable and more complex deployment process. AWS GuardDuty users praise the knowledge and responsiveness of the support team, emphasizing problem-solving efficiency. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is commended for top-notch professionalism and consistent expertise, with users highlighting efficient issue resolution and high satisfaction.

The summary above is based on 78 interviews we conducted recently with AWS GuardDuty and Microsoft Defender for Cloud users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

December 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 825,399 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

Read full review

Terence Dube

AWS Cloud Engineer at Standard Telephones and Cables

Comprehensive threat detection simplifies security management

GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be useful, including more granular details in findings, such as specific user actions or historical comparisons, would be beneficial. Furthermore, managing global AWS environments requires setting up additional tools for viewing GuardDuty findings across multiple regions. A unified dashboard that aggregates findings across all regions without requiring manual aggregation could enhance convenience for users.

Read full review

Javier_Rodriguez

Cloud Consultant at i-Community AG

Unified security management enhances threat detection and streamlines user experience

At the moment, we work with Sophos, SentinelOne, or Microsoft Defender. Most of our customers have Microsoft infrastructure, and they are cloud-only customers with Microsoft business licensing. I primarily recommend Microsoft Defender for customers who already have Microsoft infrastructure The…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's helped free up staff time so that they can work on other projects."

"The most valuable feature of PingSafe is its integration with most of our technology stack, specifically all of our cloud platforms and ticketing software."

"SentinelOne's behaviour analytics are valuable because they detect anomalies and malicious behaviour that signature-based solutions might miss."

"You not only get to know about vulnerabilities and misconfigurations but also some of the actual"

"The features that stand out are threat detection using advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, helping to identify and respond to threats in real-time."

"Cloud Native Security's most valuable features include cloud misconfiguration detection and remediation, compliance monitoring, a robust authentication security engine, and cloud threat detection and response capabilities."

"The cloud misconfiguration is the most valuable feature."

"For Singularity, the task capability is easy to use and it has a very intuitive dashboard, which streamlines the processes."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"GuardDuty's comprehensive threat detection does not only monitor data - it also detects a wide range of security threats."

"The solution provides AWS GuardDuty S3 protection, EKS runtime protection, and malware protection."

"It is a highly scalable solution since it is a service by AWS. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"The correlation back end is the solution's most valuable feature."

"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 security risks."

"We use the tool for threat detection. AWS includes AI features as well. AWS GuardDuty gives us reports."

"AWS GuardDuty helps by providing continuous threat detection and signaling potential threats. Its most valuable feature is continuous monitoring. The tool's integration with other AWS services has improved security. It provides continuous monitoring and intelligent threat detection, quickly signaling any issues. I would rate this improvement a seven out of ten."

"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."

More AWS GuardDuty pros

"The pricing is good."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its support for cloud-native services like Kubernetes, containers, managed storage, and databases. Protecting these without Microsoft Defender for Cloud would be extremely challenging. For threat protection specifically, I find the signature-based detection and heuristic detection features very effective."

"Defender lets you orchestrate the roll-out from a single pane. Using the Azure portal, you can roll it out over all the servers covered by the entire subscription."

"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the insights, meaning the remediation suggestions, as well as the incident alerts."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has improved our security poster by at least 100 percent."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has made our environment more secure."

"It helps you to identify the gaps in your solution and remediate them. It produces a compliance checklist against known standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, iTrust, etc."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

Cons

"PingSafe can improve by eliminating 100 percent of the false positives."

"I export CSV. I cannot export graphs. Restricting it to the CSV format has its own disadvantages. These are all machine IP addresses and information. I cannot change it to the JSON format. The export functionality can be improved."

"The alerting system of the product is an area that I look at and sometimes get confused about. I feel the alerting feature needs improvement."

"We've found a lot of false positives."

"In terms of ease of use, initially, it is a bit confusing to navigate around, but once you get used to it, it becomes easier."

"Maybe container runtime security could be improved."

"The Kubernetes scanning on the Oracle Cloud needs to be improved. It's on the roadmap. AWS has this capability, but it's unavailable for Oracle Cloud."

"PingSafe's current documentation could be improved to better assist customers during the cluster onboarding process."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"It would be great if the solution had some automation capabilities."

"I would like to see more integration with other AWS provided services."

"I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use."

"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."

"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."

"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."

"For the next release, they could provide IPS features as well."

"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."

More AWS GuardDuty cons

"The solution could improve by being more intuitive and easier to use requiring less technical knowledge."

"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."

"Azure's system could be more on point like AWS support. For example, if I have an issue with AWS, I create a support ticket, then I get a call or a message. With Azure support, you raise a ticket, and somebody calls back depending on their availability and the priority, which might not align with your business priority."

"However, some Copilot features aren't available in the GCP environment. This is something we hope will be addressed in the future."

"After getting a recommendation, it takes time for the solution to refresh properly to show that the problem has been eliminated."

"Microsoft Graph needs improvement."

"I've heard there might be issues with scalability for larger enterprises."

"Most of the time, when we log into the support, we don't get a chance to interact with Microsoft employees directly, except having it go to outsource employees of Microsoft. The initial interaction has not been that great because outsourced companies cannot provide the kind of quality or technical expertise that we look for. We have a technical manager from Microsoft, but they are kind of average unless we make noise and ask them to escalate. We then can get the right people and the right solution, but it definitely takes time."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"PingSafe is cost-effective for the amount of infrastructure we have. It's reasonable for what they offer compared to our previous solution. It's at least 25 percent to 30 percent less."

"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."

"It is not that expensive. There are some tools that are double the cost of PingSafe. It is good on the pricing side."

"We have an enterprise license. It is affordable. I'm not sure, but I think we pay 150,000 rupees per month."

"The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"

"It is a little expensive. I would rate it a four out of ten for pricing."

"PingSafe is less expensive than other options."

"SentinelOne provided competitive pricing compared to other vendors, and we are satisfied with the deal."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"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."

"I have heard that the solution's price is quite high."

"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."

"The platform is inexpensive."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."

More AWS GuardDuty pricing and cost advice

"Security Center charges $15 per resource for any workload that you onboard into it. They charge per VM or per data-base server or per application. It's not like Microsoft 365 licensing, where there are levels like E3 and E5. Security Center is pretty straightforward."

"The tool is pretty expensive."

"This solution is more cost-effective than some competing products. My understanding is that it is based on the number of integrations that you have, so if you have fewer subscriptions then you pay less for the service."

"The pricing and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud have been good for us. We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license."

"Defender for Cloud is pretty costly for a single line. It's incredibly high to pay monthly for security per server. The cost is considerable for an enterprise with 500-plus virtual machines, and the monthly bill can spike."

"Defender's basic version is free, which is good. Many of our teams are evaluating the paid version against third-party products."

"This is a worldwide service and depending on the country, there will be different prices."

"Our clients complain about the cost of Microsoft Defender for Cloud."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

825,399 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools. This cost can be particularly prohibitive for small busi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating sy...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon GuardDuty?

With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavi...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon GuardDuty?

GuardDuty is very cheap and operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. It's priced around a dollar per million requests, maki...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?

GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments. While incorporating Amazon Detective for detailed investigation can be usef...

See all answers

How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening acros...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 30% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 23% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 6% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 3% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 3% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 12% of the time

Wiz vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 11% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 7% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 3% of the time

Orca Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 2% of the time

More AWS GuardDuty Competitors

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

Wiz vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Defender XDR vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Firewall vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

December 2024

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty

December 2024

Download AWS GuardDuty product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

December 2024

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

No data available

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

Learn More

SentinelOne

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

SentinelOne

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

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

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

December 2024

Free Report: AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

825,399 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our AWS GuardDuty vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud 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.