AWS Control Tower vs. ThreatLocker

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

Threatlocker does exactly as it advertises. I would recommend it to anyone seeking a comprehensive solution for managing software approvals. It is also very easy to use with an online support team, or Cyberheros, as they call it, that is very quick and responsive. The preset programs are also a nice touch, making deployment easy.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Application whitelisting.
• Unified audits of everything network & application.
• Clean and concise portal to manage the same.
• Dynamic ability to allow users to request more apps.
• Security and a sense of complete control.

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

• When running the Unified Audit, I like to use certain filters. I wish there as a way to save those filters, so I don't have to select them every time I do a Unified Audit.

Incentivized

ThreaLocker has done its job and has prevented malware from executing. It has stopped an encryption process once already. It has kept a user from going to a bad website. He tried twice and was wondering why he was getting an error message from ThreatLocker and ESET both.

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

Technician and Analyst alike will love this tool as long as they learn to use it. They have fantastic study material that breaks everything down on it where to find settings and how to best manage the tool. End users are the only complaints we get only because they sometimes don't understand that installing a PDF convertor that is labeled as Free on the internet isn't always in their best interest.

There is rarely ever an outage. I have seen slowness in ThreatLocker service. But that is very rare too!

Incentivized

ThreatLocker is always available. The admin's console loads very fast and report runs almost instantly. It does not interfere with operating system.

Incentivized

You can email, call or do online chat with tech support. I love their online chat. They are quick and friendly. Also, if you need to show them something, you can give the chat technician permission from your Chat box to allow the tech access to your computer. They also can pull out your admin console on their side. They can look at your "Unified Audit" log and see the same thing that you can. They have a good KnowledgeBase that you can look for answers. They have what is called "ThreatLocker University" where you can go through tutorials and take tests.

Incentivized

The owners and co-founders work with you through Zoom Meetings. They walk you through how to use and setup ThreatLocker. They also have webinars. You also can go through ThreatLocker University online training.

Incentivized

Using ThreatLocker University online training is very easy and informative. You take online tests to see how well you learned the material. It is great!

Incentivized

ThreatLocker is a family ran business. The owners, co-founders work with you to ensure you are up and running as quickly as possible. They went to ensure your success with ThreatLocker.

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

Prior to buying ThreatLocker, we evaluated Tanium's whitelisting module. We felt that ThreatLocker's method of baselining existing applications and comparing them to known IoC's made for an easier implementation. To be fair, this was solely based on demonstrations by each vendor and not by actual PoC's. The implementation for ThreatLocker went smoothly and we have very few issues with the product that require support intervention. When support is needed, it is readily available via chat.

Incentivized

ThreatLocker is very easy to add new ThreatLocker agents on computers and servers. It is very easy to do. You can install an agent on a computer or server in about 2 minutes or less.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Allowed us to deliver zero-trust at an affordable cost
• Can be managed with existing skillset
• Most cost effective application control for small businesses

Incentivized