AWS Control Tower vs. Symantec Cloud Workload Protection

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

The high level of IT expertise was recognized when using Symantec Cloud Workload Protection as security software when forming a business partnership with a major IT company. In addition, since it is possible to centrally manage the control of USB devices to each employee's PC, it is of great help to the head of the company's security department to be able to handle it with one hand.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Ultimate Protection
• Ransomware resiliency
• Better Policy management
• Cloud model with Offline Agent deployment

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

• Occasionally, the security system would detect the introduction of a dedicated tool or system from another company that is generally not available.
• With a 16GB laptop, the PC will be slow when scanning.
• While developing, I feel a little inconvenience that the PC freezes when scanning runs behind the scenes.

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

• Positive - ROI for long term deployment
• Negative - Support
• Negative - Offline infra protection
• Positive - Product Features

Incentivized