AWS GuardDuty vs BMC Helix Cloud Security comparison

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) Logo
9,041 views|7,631 comparisons
85% willing to recommend
BMC Logo
244 views|185 comparisons
80% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Mar 29, 2023

We performed a comparison between AWS GuardDuty and BMC Helix Cloud Security based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: AWS GuardDuty's initial setup depends on the architecture but is self-explanatory. Integrations can be complex, but it's straightforward overall. BMC Helix Cloud Security offers easy deployment and uses a cloud encryption methodology.
  • Features: AWS GuardDuty's key feature is its threat detection capability, monitoring multiple sources of logs to report security anomalies in cloud infra and accounts. BMC Helix Cloud Security offers a unified approach to IT service management and a holistic view of the IT landscape, improving overall security posture and protecting sensitive data across different environments.
  • Pricing: AWS GuardDuty’s pricing is based on per gigabyte usage, with a reasonable cost structure that scales up as usage increases. BMC Helix Cloud Security may be considered expensive for small and medium-sized businesses, requiring careful evaluation of the cost-benefit analysis.
  • Service and Support: AWS GuardDuty offers responsive technical support with 24/7 service and efficient issue resolution. BMC Helix Cloud Security provides responsive customer support with multiple IT solutions, including incident management, asset management, and approval workflows.

Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, AWS GuardDuty comes out ahead of BMC Helix Cloud Security. While both products offer easy deployment, BMC Helix Cloud Security may be considered expensive for small and medium-sized businesses.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. BMC Helix Cloud Security Report (Updated: March 2024).
770,765 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The correlation back end is the solution's most valuable feature.""The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms.""It helps us detect brute-force attacks based on machine learning.""We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty.""The solution will detect abnormalities in the AWS workload and alert us so that we can monitor and take action.""It is a highly scalable solution since it is a service by AWS. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.""The solution is easy to use.""Deployment is great, and we didn't face any big challenges."

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"Role-based security is a valuable feature.""The cool feature of Helix Cloud Security is that you can do all that — understand and remediate issues — in one dashboard, based on the different policies that are available for security, out-of-the-box.""The best feature is time to value. With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud. If you have Azure and AWS deployments, you might have multiple subscriptions in Azure and usually multiple accounts in AWS. You may even be doing some GCP work (around Google Cloud Platform). It's very difficult to manage a common set of policies, even less reporting, across multiple subscriptions, accounts, and cloud environments. What BMC Helix Cloud Security does is provide a unified view or single pane of glass as to your baseline. Then, it also facilitates the ability for Level 1 or 2 operations support to take action and report on security vulnerabilities.""It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP.""The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools.""The most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities."

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Cons
"It would be great if the solution had some automation capabilities.""Because it's a threat detection service, they need to keep up with the various threat factors because new threat factors and attack factors come up all the time.""One improvement I would suggest for AWS GuardDuty is the ability to assign findings to specific users or groups, facilitating better communication and follow-up actions.""Some of the pain points in Amazon GuardDuty was the cost. When compared to some of the other services, depending on how many we had to monitor, if we had a huge range of accounts, as our accounts increased, we had a cost factor that came into play. Sometimes there were issues, for example, with findings that came up, we wanted to add notes and there were issues back then where notes couldn't be entered properly. If we wanted to leave a note such as "Okay, we have assessed this and this is how we feel", or "This is a false positive", Amazon GuardDuty wasn't allowing us to do that. Even with the suppression of certain findings, there was some issue that we had faced at one time. Those were some of the pain points of the solution.""The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options.""For me, I would say just the presentation of findings, like the dashboards and other stuff, could be improved a bit.""The solution has to be integrated with new services that AWS adds like QuickSight, Managed Airflow, AppFlow and MWAA.""Improvement-wise, Amazon GuardDuty should have an overall dashboard analytics function so we could see what's in the current environment, and then in addition to that, provide best practices and recommendations, particularly to provide some type of observability, and then figure out the login side of it, based on our current environment, in terms of what we're not monitoring and what we should monitor. The solution should also give us a sample code configuration to implement that added feature or feature request. What I'd like to see in the next release of Amazon GuardDuty are more security analytics, reporting, and monitoring. They should provide recommendations and additional options that answer questions such as "Hey, what can we see in our environment?", "What should we implement within the environment?", What's recommended?" We know that cost will always be associated with that, but Amazon GuardDuty should show us the increased costs or decreased costs if we implement it or don't implement it, and that would be a good feature request, particularly with all products within AWS, just for cloud products in general because there are times features are implemented, but once they're deployed, they don't tell you about costs that would be generated along with those features. After features are deployed, there should a summary of the costs that would be generated, and projected based on current usage, so they would give us the option to figure out how long we're going to use those features and the option to keep those on or turn those off. If more services were like that, a lot more people would use those on the cloud."

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"We've had some with issues connectors. The connectors have seemed to have caused a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment. The only time I've had to reach out to tech support was for that. It seems it may not have been scanning correctly or I wasn't seeing data within a specific time. But we've set up a couple of connectors in the past couple of weeks and they actually scanned the AWS environment and we had data within about 10 minutes. It's working a lot faster and I think they're making improvements as they go.""The UI could be more user-friendly.""Every organization out there doesn't rely on just one control body. They use FISMA control. They may use HIPAA, CIS, PCI, or SOX, then blend them. One of the things that is now in big demand for BMC Helix Cloud Security is content. That's the next journey in its lifespan, making it easier for the community to share and collaborate on content for security controls that can be measured and remediated.""BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features.""I want the role-based security feature to be improved."

More BMC Helix Cloud Security Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."
  • "I don't have all the details in terms of licensing for Amazon GuardDuty, but my organization does have a license set up for it."
  • "In terms of the costs associated with Amazon GuardDuty, it was $1 per GB from what I recall. Pricing was based on per gigabyte. For example, for the first five hundred gigabytes per month, it'll be $1 per GB, so it'll be $500. If your usage was greater, there's another bracket, for example, the next two thousand GB, then there's an add-on cost of 50 cents per GB. That's how Amazon GuardDuty pricing slowly goes up. I can't remember if there was any kind of additional cost apart from standard licensing for the solution. Nothing else that at least comes to mind. What the service was charging was worth it. That was one good thing when using Amazon GuardDuty because my company could be in a certain tier for a certain period. My company wasn't under a licensing model where it could overestimate its usage and under-utilize its usage and pay much more. This was what made the pricing model for Amazon GuardDuty better."
  • "Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."
  • "The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."
  • "On a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price, I rate the pricing a four or five, which is somewhere in the middle."
  • "GuardDuty only enables accounts in regions where you have an active workload. If there are places where you don't have an active workload, you wouldn't even enable them. That's one area where they could allow you to cut down your cost."
  • "The tool has no subscription charges."
  • More AWS GuardDuty Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It is a subscription model with term licensing that is usually yearly. This includes, not only the product, but support and maintenance. It is based on cloud assets. Therefore, if you have 100 cloud assets, those cloud assets are measured based on evaluation or transactions. For example, if I'm evaluating that cloud asset for CIS compliance, PCI compliance, and AWS best practices, that asset gets evaluated three times, as those are three transactions. However, the license model is based on peak asset usage. So, over a year, if you deploy 100, 1000, 500, and then 2000 assets, you will be charged for the 2000 peak of assets managed by Helix Cloud Security."
  • "The pricing is based on an annual subscription, upfront, and it's based on cloud assets. Whether your assets are in Azure and AWS combined, the tool tells you how many assets are being scanned and that's the number used for pricing."
  • More BMC Helix Cloud Security Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavior or traffic patterns right away, which is great for staying on top of potential… more »
    Top Answer:80 percent of the customers are using AWS GuardDuty, and we recommend it due to its low cost, especially for small customers, ranging from five to ten dollars a month. In our policies, we enforce the… more »
    Top Answer:One improvement I would suggest for AWS GuardDuty is the ability to assign findings to specific users or groups, facilitating better communication and follow-up actions. It would be beneficial to have… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable aspects of BMC Helix Cloud Security are its security features and regulatory compliance capabilities.
    Top Answer:I would rate the price of BMC Helix Cloud Security as a seven in terms of costliness. It is not the cheapest option available, as it tends to be more expensive than some competitors, but it offers… more »
    Top Answer:BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features. It currently consists of separate point solutions that don't flow together as seamlessly as they could… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    9,041
    Comparisons
    7,631
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    658
    Rating
    8.1
    Views
    244
    Comparisons
    185
    Reviews
    2
    Average Words per Review
    453
    Rating
    7.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon Guard Duty is a continuous cloud security monitoring service that consistently monitors and administers several data sources. These include AWS CloudTrail data events for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) audit logs, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) flow logs, DNS (Domain Name System) logs, S3 (Simple Cloud Storage), and AWS CloudTrail event logs.

    Amazon GuardDuty intuitively uses threat intelligence data - such as lists of malicious domains and IP addresses - and ML (machine learning) to quickly discover suspicious and problematic activity in a user's AWS ecosystem. Activities may include concerns such as interactions with malicious IP addresses or domains, exposed credentials usage, or changes and/or escalation of privileges.

    GuardDuty is able to easily determine problematic AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances delivering malware or mining bitcoin. It is also able to trace AWS account access history for evidence of destabilization. such as suspicious API calls resulting in changing password policies to minimize password strength or anomalous infrastructure deployments in new or different never-used regions.

    GuardDuty will continually alert users regarding their AWS environment status and will send the security discoveries to the GuardDuty dashboard or Amazon CloudWatch events for users to view.

    Users can access GuardDuty via:

    • AWS SDKs: Amazon provides users with several software development kits (SDKs) that are made up of libraries and sample code of numerous popular programming languages and platforms, such as Android, iOS, Java, .Net, Python, and Ruby. The SDKs make it easier to develop programmatic access to GuardDuty.

    • GuardDuty HTTPS API: This allows users to issue HTTPS requests directly to the service.

    • GuardDuty Console: This is a browser-based intuitive dashboard interface where users can access and use GuardDuty.

    Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

    Kubernetes protection is an optional add-on in Amazon GuardDuty. This tool is able to discover malicious behavior and possible destabilization of an organization's Kubernetes clusters inside of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

    When Amazon EKS is activated, GuardDuty will actively use various data sources to discover potential risks against Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes protection is enabled, GuardDuty uses optional data sources to detect threats against Kubernetes API.

    Kubernetes audit logs are a Kubernetes feature that captures historical API activity from applications, the control plane, users, and endpoints. GuardDuty collates these logs from Amazon EKS to create Kubernetes discoveries for the organization's Amazon EKS assets; there is no need to store or turn on the logs.

    As long as Kubernetes protection remains activated, GuardDuty will continuously dissect Kubernetes data sources from the Amazon EKS clusters to ensure no suspicious or anomalous behavior is taking place.

    Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Protection

    Amazon S3 allows Amazon GuardDuty to actively audit object-level API processes to discover possible security threats to data inside an organization's S3 buckets. GuardDuty continually audits risk to the organization’s S3 assets by carefully dissecting AWS CloudTrail management events and AWS CloudTrail S3 data events. These tools are continually auditing various CloudTrail management events for potential suspicious activities that affect S3 buckets, such as PutBucketReplication, DeleteBucket, ListBucket, and data events for S3 object-level API processes, such as PutObject, GetObject, ListObject, and DeleteObject.

    Reviews from Real Users

    The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms. Prior to using GuardDuty, we had multiple systems to collect data and put it in a centralized location so we could look into it. Now we don't need to do that anymore as GuardDuty does it for us.” - Arunkumar A., Information Security Manager at Tata Consultancy Services

    BMC Helix Cloud Security is a SaaS tool designed to help organizations reduce compliance and security lapses resulting from next-gen container and cloud technologies. The solution offers a fully transparent, user-friendly view of all compliance data gathered throughout container resources, cloud, and data centers. BMC Helix Cloud Security can be used to insert compliance inquiries precisely in DevOps workflows for immediate assessment in relation to critical “go, no-go” conclusions throughout  the entire workflow. 

    BMC Helix Cloud Security offers enterprise organizations a unique compliance solution with robust functionalities to concentrate on numerous use processes that may interfere with digital transfigurations, such as:

    • Discovering resources, accounts, and configurations that are non-compliant with standard regulations or the organization's own policies and protocols.

    • Multi-source cloud compliance for PaaS service infrastructures, networks, storage, and containers.

    • DevOps workflows with melded security and compliance for WebApp application blueprints and weaknesses, and all application libraries.

    • Out-of-box capabilities for immediate compliance integration for DevOps workflows.

    BMC Helix Cloud Security is SaaS, which makes it a very flexible solution. It is able to integrate seamlessly with many of today’s enterprises’ demands. BMC Helix Cloud Security can easily perform as a policy-as-code (YAML) based protocol language, open RESTful APIs, or by seamlessly compiling extensible data connectors.

    Many of today's enterprise organizations must comply with numerous policies and regulations to maintain effective operations. BMC Helix Cloud Security ensures an enterprise organization is able to satisfy regulatory standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, Defense Information System Agency (DISA), or any other stringent government or internal organizational compliance standards. The solution has a comprehensive compliance policy that utilizes mode-two capabilities and will ensure that an enterprise organization will greatly minimize or even negate the threat of ransomware and data breaches throughout its network. 

    BMC Helix Cloud Security will also see that container and container hosts are configured correctly and will then regularly audit to ensure compliance at the three important levels of compliance - images, daemon configuration, and host configuration.

    BMC Helix Cloud Security is designed to identify vulnerabilities by dissecting and thoroughly investigating compliance data for container and cloud resources and delivering the outcomes through a friendly, easy-to-understand dashboard. The solution can also provide support for unique or custom sources, provided that data is in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

    BMC Helix Cloud security is also able to help discover and minimize vulnerabilities created by new services, objects, and resources instituted by containers and public clouds. These can sometimes be forgotten, creating a tremendous risk to an organization. BMC Helix Cloud Security will ensure these new services will be carefully and continually monitored to ensure industry and government standards and regulations are not being compromised. The solution is continually dissecting data and then will deliver outcomes in a dynamic, easy-to-understand dashboard.

    BMC Helix Cloud Security offers a user-friendly, robust, complete compliance strategy to ensure organizations maintain the highest levels of productivity and profitability while negating the risk of any type of compliance vulnerabilities.

    Sample Customers
    autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot
    NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm43%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Media Company7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Real Estate/Law Firm6%
    Energy/Utilities Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise67%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise73%
    Buyer's Guide
    AWS GuardDuty vs. BMC Helix Cloud Security
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. BMC Helix Cloud Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    770,765 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    AWS GuardDuty is ranked 4th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 20 reviews while BMC Helix Cloud Security is ranked 25th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 5 reviews. AWS GuardDuty is rated 8.0, while BMC Helix Cloud Security is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS GuardDuty writes "A stellar threat-detection service that has helped bolster security against malicious threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of BMC Helix Cloud Security writes "A highly scalable and straightforward solution with a knowledgeable support team". AWS GuardDuty is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, Wiz and Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP, whereas BMC Helix Cloud Security is most compared with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, VMware Aria Operations, Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform, Greenqloud qstack and CloudBolt. See our AWS GuardDuty vs. BMC Helix Cloud Security report.

    See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.