AWS Control Tower vs. Qualys TruRisk Platform

AWS Control Tower is great if you have multiple organizations or disciplines inside a company that needs to be separated for billing purposes or separation of concern. Multiple accounts is part of AWS's well-architected framework and are generally a good idea. AWS Control Tower makes central logging easy which enables those logs to be quickly picked up by a logging tool to provide even more reports and insight. For smaller organizations, AWS Control Tower may seem like an over-engineered solution

Incentivized

It is well suited for environments that are looking for a solution that is top notch for vulnerability scanning, and is the most accurate at doing so. It would also fit environments that have a lot of endpoints to scan or like to have scanning done on an automatic basis. It is less appropriate in environments that want to use a platform right away, without getting training in how to use it, or reading documentation on the product.

Incentivized

• AWS Control Tower integrates with AWS organizations
• AWS Control Tower provides Account Factory to provision preconfigured AWS accounts
• AWS Control Tower helps to isolate workloads and billing via AWS accounts separation
• AWS Control Tower supports data residency controls out of the box
• AWS Control Tower supports post provisioning actions to newly provisioned AWS accounts: for example it can trigger enabling VPC flow logs in the new account

Incentivized

• Attestation is so easy with Qualys. I find this one feature makes the investment worth the cost
• Ease of use. Within an hour of first installing, a person can be running compliance tests without a hitch.
• Great training materials and support. I have never had to take more than twenty minutes to solve a problem either through support or the forums.

Incentivized

• This level of abstraction leaves you vulnerable to not knowing exactly what's been created, and that can enable you to mess things up.
• Because it provisions things on your behalf, you might end up paying for resources you don't need.
• The import process of existing accounts, which we did not end up pursuing, is tedious and manual.

Incentivized

• Notices some findings which were not clear why they appear(suspected false positive).
• Working with Qualys support(for example due to the previous point) wasn't the best experience. the response was very slow.
• Qualys limit the daily API requests. In case you need more, it will cost.

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

Again, the usability of Qualys has been a pinpoint for this entire review. It was easily the worst thing about the product and because of this, I would not recommend Qualys to anybody in my field. This should be something that Qualys strives to improve if they wish to stay in business.

Incentivized

They had a support page within the WAS to report any concerns or seek help. But the UI of that is not smooth. Regardless support staff were pretty responsive and helpful. They scheduled calls to understand and address our problems. Email support is good as well.

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

We find that Nessus is a great product, on par if not slightly better compared to Qualys in terms of their pricing model. However, Qualys Cloud Platform has better quality reporting, and offers great tips and suggestions on quickly closing a gap and eliminating the risk. In our organization, both products are great and meet our expectations, but due to pricing, we favor Nessus slightly more.

Incentivized

• AWS Control tower allowed us to drop several third-party vendors for security appliances and logging, which saved us considerable funds.
• AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we spend deploying AWS accounts.
• AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we have to spend on quarterly security audits.

Incentivized

• The most important thing that happens with this program is to automate one hundred percent the security of my system since this program is in charge of supervising each of the applications and websites in detail.
• One of the purposes for which we trust Qualys Cloud Platform is to keep our system clean and secure; the ability of this software to manage our vulnerability makes us more cautious about working with it.

Incentivized