AWS Config vs. AWS OpsWorks vs. Microsoft Defender for Cloud

It's really good if your infrastructure services is all in AWS, that means everything could be audited and monitored using AWS config. You also can create alarms to notify you or your team about any changes on your AWS resources which is very useful to prevent abuse if you have a fairly large team. It's also very useful whenever some third party wants to audit your AWS resources, if you have a fairly comprehensive AWS config configured, the auditing process will be easy since they only need to look at your AWS config setup.

Incentivized

Where you already have some Chef recipes to build your application boxes and are happy to run directly on VMs, OpsWorks really shines. It won't do anything too complex for you, so it only really works well for simple stacks (load balancers, application layers, database layers). If you want to do more complex infrastructure, Cloudformation or Terraform are probably worth looking at.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is very good at allowing users to see how their Azure environment is secure through the secure score. The recommendations are an excellent source of the controls that should be in place to ensure a secure environment. There needs to be more protection and features for data security.

Incentivized

• The ability to track changes in AWS is paramount, AWS config allows you to do this
• Allows the auditing of an AWS account
• Can view history of an account that has AWS config enabled

Incentivized

• connect between serveral AWS services (EC2, RDS, ELB)
• easy configuration management deployment via Chef

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

• It's only AWS, no third party.
• Not the most intuitive interface, but with a little getting used to it is OK.

Incentivized

• Getting up and running with OpsWorks is a very technical and potentially time-consuming process. You need to know the ins and outs of Chef/Puppet if you really want to get into it and there isn't a convenient way to test out the environment locally so debugging can be time-consuming.
• To take advantage of some of the newer AWS instance types you need to be running on a VPC, which again is a pain if you don't have a DevOps team.
• The error logs and monitoring metrics in OpsWorks are pretty basic and haven't changed much over the years.

Incentivized

• The licensing structure could be better by providing possibilities for partial deployment in a subscription
• The information in the dashboards are sometimes scattered, there should be a better overall view
• Some parts of Defender for Cloud are expensive, some features should be moved to the standard capabilities of Azure

It is a great product that integrates nicely when running an Azure platform and even multi-cloud environment. Not looking for point-solutions but a suite that answers most requirements. It is very comfortable being able to use KQL, workbooks and automation that is native to the azure platform

My visibility is limited because I'm only doing very small pieces of what the overall org does. And also, we have limitations on what we're allowed to use. It's not like we get a new product as users or leadership level users, and everything is on, and we can just do whatever we want. We're very restricted in what we can use any tooling within the org because of the different levels of regulatory constraints we have, because of just the nature of who we are inherently. So that's why. I don't think it's necessarily the product. I think it's more or less of what we're able to do with the product.

Incentivized

Would rate lower for other workloads but for AWS workloads its simple to set up, cost effective and customisable. Primary use case is compliance from a governance perspective.

Incentivized

Unless you pay for a pricey support package getting support on OpsWorks will be pretty slow. Documentation is also relatively limited and sometimes hard to follow when compared to competitors. Generally, we've been able to get the answers we need from OpsWorks support when we run into problems but don't expect rapid responses.

Incentivized

I do not know or have used any other product in AWS cloud space that matches what AWS Config provides. We have some custom built monitoring and governance, however that is there because AWS Config does not provide it currently.

Incentivized

OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the other services on offer from AWS, it is good to use as a stepping stone along the way when building your systems - or perhaps it would be entirely suitable for a fairly simple project.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is definitely the choice with the latest market trend and attacks that are currently happening. Microsoft has been able to safe guard a lot after the recent serious attacks happening globally in the digital world. There is a trust in this software and with the latest updates and machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud should be the choice.

Incentivized

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized

• very quick way of creating new infrastructure
• low maintenance costs
• easy to create high availability setups thus reducing costs

Incentivized

• It simplifies security management and saves time. I'm not sure, but I'm very confident it saved me a couple of paychecks by centralizing the data I need to secure the cloud environment.
• I also utilize the inventory overview to monitor my team's activities and verify they are following internal regulations, as well as cost overruns.
• The recommendations can be utilized as a valuable instructional tool. I have the team explain why they are receiving them, why they are not following them, and what they are doing differently.

Incentivized