AWS Control Tower vs. Vulcan Cyber

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

It's really challenging at times to contend with multiple vulnerabilities on a daily basis, and having a way to make sense of what actually needs to be prioritized and what can be shifted further down the task list is extremely helpful. Because the solution suggests what your next step should be in mitigating a specific vulnerability, it helps us save time and research by enabling us to immediately take action after being informed about an issue.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Alerting us to critical vulnerabilities
• Prioritizing the patch tasks that are most time-sensitive
• Providing a solution and roadmap to pressing issues

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

• Auto-update feature could be streamlined

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

Vulcan was easier to implement with our existing Security environment. The UX and UI were more intuitive and user-friendly. While SOAR is a super solid product, for our business Vulcan made more sense. It was more of a natural fit for a rapidly-expanding company in a hyper-growth phase using Edge technology.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Saving research hours for SecOps team
• Saving resolution hours for Security Engineering team
• Protecting the company from data breaches -- which could tremendously affect the business

Incentivized