AWS Control Tower vs. Cisco Umbrella Easy Protect for MSPs

We were wanting to prove the concept of a low touch process for quickly spinning up boilerplate AWS environments. We were able to get started quickly and to ensure that the AWS Well-Architected Framework principles were followed - at least upfront - however, we found that for our use case and expertise level it ultimately wasn't a fit. We have the skills on our team to manage more of this on our own. My recommendation would be contingent on what skills are already available on your team: if you can "do it yourself" you might as well so that you don't pay for resources you don't need and you have finer grain control over what's created.

Incentivized

If you have a large number of clients that need to access different products within your company it is a good fit. If you just need to protect access within your company, you'd probably just want to look into Cisco Umbrella. The MSP product is specifically tapered to [manage] access from 3rd parties outside of the company.

Incentivized

• Easily create new AWS accounts.
• Easily secure and manage AWS accounts.
• Landing zone with SSO is a huge win for larger teams.

Incentivized

• The AWS SSO GUI is not very intuitive and determining how to apply policies to users without creating redundant logins has been a challenge.
• The default guardrails do not fully encompass all the security checks that we needed.
• There does not appear to be any way to control roles at the IAM level from the control tower account through the GUI.
• Some features on AWS accounts still require logging into the individual account with the root user and cannot be done from AWS Control Tower.

Incentivized

• Analyzing security logs can be challenging as the interface is rather slow and due to the large quantity of logged data.
• It is not always clear why a resource was blocked as there are 2 types of block lists
• Clients sometimes have to re-logon in order to get an updated policy rolled out.

Incentivized

There is no way to easily close an AWS account whether it was created manually or via the AWS Control Tower. It takes too many steps to close it vs to provision a new AWS account

Incentivized

Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, but for us, the use case associated with AWS Systems Manager was a better fit for our specific needs and skillsets. We did not need everything that AWS Control Tower was doing for us.

Incentivized

• Less time manually deploying accounts which was error prone.
• Central logging allowed us to have 1 place to view logs.

Incentivized

• Not always clear which block list caused an access issue. [There are] several places that need to be checked.
• Client policies take a while to get updated, sometimes need to re-logon

Incentivized