AWS CloudTrail vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

It is necessary to enable [AWS] Cloudtrail when using AWS in a production environment, otherwise you will not have any idea what is happening within your accounts. Third party monitoring applications will all require [AWS] CloudTrail to be enabled as well. I would not recommend it solely as a monitoring tool, to get the most out of it you must send the logs elsewhere. Either to Cloudwatch logs or a third party product.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender is very good while we are enhancing our organization's security, and it is very useful in getting threat alerts and vulnerabilities that can harm our system and users. It is recommended to use this to improve overall security and threat protection of our users and organization. With the help of Microsoft Defender, we get fully covered and secured.

• API Log
• User activity tracking
• Real-time alerts

Incentivized

• detect and respond to security threats in the cloud environment, reducing the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
• The product assists our organization dealing with sensitive data in achieving and maintaining compliance with data protection rules.
• The product provides real-time visibility into the cloud environment, offering insights into ongoing security activities.
• It guarantees that security teams can actively handle possible threats by delivering real-time monitoring and notifications, reducing the impact on business operations.

Incentivized

• [In my experience] Cost can easily get out of control with multiple trails on full logging
• Logs can be difficult to decipher

Incentivized

• 'Regulatory Compliance' is definitely an area of improvement for MDC. The complex and high number of controls within a specific framework should allow a more helpful and detailed guidelines in order to tackle them.
• The limitation of options in the incident management menu of MDC has proven to be a hassle while managing security alerts. For example, an analyst cannot even provide a comment about the actions taken on an incident.
• There is a missing functionality of connecting other EDR or XDR solutions to MDC which I think should be there for a CSPM tool.

Incentivized

I think in the end, CloudTrail has more features and you can dive deeper inside the logs so it depends on your usage and what you expect in the end to make the right choice, I would say that both tools are really useful and bring a lot of benefits to I.T. companies.

Incentivized

Defender for Cloud (previously known as Azure Security Center) is a more comprehensive and extensive security solution. Currently, threat analytics make up only a small portion of the whole picture. It encourages a comprehensive picture of the cloud environment across all of its endpoints. For example, firewalls, virtual machine coverage, etc. When compared to the former Threat Analytics, the attack surface of Defender for Cloud is vastly expanded.

Incentivized

• Allows us to investigate any strange api actions
• Increases security
• Audit trail of changes made in AWS

Incentivized

• It creates a great insight in all assets that are available
• The CSPM makes sure that certain risk that might have been missed are addressed
• Being able to query across the data gives great insights in threats and possible vulernabilties for CVEs