AWS

A Comparison Between CloudTrail and GuardDuty

AWS is a cloud service providing platform working since 2006 and is adopted by millions of users across the globe. The main concern of any organization about moving to the cloud is the security threats attached to it. AWS ensures that its infrastructure is more secure by adding CloudTrail and GuardDuty services.

This guide will explain CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and a comparison between them.

What is AWS CloudTrail?

When big companies or organizations move their workloads to the cloud, it becomes difficult to keep track of every resource being used. Maintaining logs can be an option to solve this problem but it takes a lot of time to configure what changes have been made to the account. AWS CloudTrail is an integrated service to monitor each resource separately and what kind of changes have been made to them:

Features of CloudTrail

Some of the important features of AWS CloudTrail are explained below:

Store: It integrates well with other services like AWS S3 to store events and CloudWatch logs on the cloud.

Monitor: CloudTrail is used to monitor the activities and workloads on the AWS account to manage possible threats.

Analyze: It allows the user to view and analyze activities by monitoring the logs stored on the AWS S3 buckets and optimize the resource usage through CloudTrail logs:

What is AWS GuardDuty?

AWS GuardDuty is used to enhance security features to the already secured AWS account by scanning for malware throughout the account. It is a continuous security monitoring service that analyzes and processes logs from different AWS services like AWS CloudTrail, VPC, DNS, etc. It prepares the list of all the logs and activities across the AWS account that can help in identifying suspicious activities:

Features of GuardDuty

The following are some of the important features of the GuardDuty:

Continuously Analyze: Enable AWS GuardDuty to analyze resources on the AWS account continuously.

Threats Detection: It uses machine learning anomaly detection to intelligently identify and manage possible threats.

Take Action: GuardDuty enables the user to take proper action to counter security threats and clean the infrastructure to use it safely:

CloudTrail Vs. GuardDuty

AWS CloudTrail and GuardDuty are different security monitoring and measuring services to make the AWS infrastructure safe and secure. CloudTrail is used to monitor AWS resources and keep track of all the activities on the cloud. GuardDuty has the motive to detect malware and probable threats before they become a serious/big issue.

Conclusion

To sum up, the CloudTrail service is used to monitor the AWS account for creating logs across the infrastructure and GuardDuty uses these logs to find suspicious activities. Both of these services are used to improve the security of the AWS account by continuously looking for the activities and malware in them. This guide has compared the AWS CloudTrail and GuardDuty services of AWS.

About the author

Talha Mahmood

As a technical author, I am eager to learn about writing and technology. I have a degree in computer science which gives me a deep understanding of technical concepts and the ability to communicate them to a variety of audiences effectively.