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AWS GuardDuty vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 12, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (10th), Container Security (11th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th)
AWS GuardDuty
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
18th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (7th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS GuardDuty is 9.0%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 2.0%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS GuardDuty9.0%
Qualys TotalCloud1.7%
Cisco Secure Workload2.0%
Other87.3%
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
 

Featured Reviews

RO
IT Security Expert at Alior Bank S.A.
Unified risk scoring has improved our cloud visibility and simplifies remediation priorities
Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IAS and SaaS. This solution provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce the work I would have to do. We are no longer based on CVSS; we are based on Qualys risk scoring, which is based on CVSS plus internal findings made by Qualys, and then assigns its own score. The TruRisk insight feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores, though I am cautious since some information is classified. Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution.
SK
Senior IT Auditor at Ernst & Young
Has provided automated threat detection and daily malicious activity insights while supporting seamless orchestration with existing dashboards
I would assess the integration of AWS GuardDuty with Threat Intelligence as majorly positive; no threat intelligence is 100% accurate, and there are a few false positives, but as a security engineer, this must be accepted, and overall, the response and service is good for us. We do not directly use AWS GuardDuty dashboard by itself, as we have our own integrated security dashboard; AWS GuardDuty gives the feed to that dashboard, and it's giving us a satisfactory view of how the security landscape looks. We use metrics such as zero-day threats, any malicious traffic, and any traffic which originates from OFAC countries to measure its effectiveness, as we are majorly into a financial institution, as any traffic that is from a malicious IP or a rogue device. I don't see any significant negative points regarding AWS GuardDuty; it's a good product to have if you're a cloud consumer. I rate AWS GuardDuty nine out of ten overall.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA
Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Its excellent graphical interface makes the scanning process simple."
"TruRisk Insights is the most important innovation they've released this year."
"The platform's unified view of the organization proves particularly valuable for leadership team meetings."
"We were able to realize its benefits within 24 to 48 hours."
"Qualys TotalCloud fulfills all these needs."
"Qualys TotalCloud helps you not just to identify misconfigurations, but you can actually also fix issues."
"It is a cloud-native app that integrates with both IaaS and SaaS. It seamlessly integrates with other platforms."
"The best feature would be the ability to create policies. It is easy to control and update policies as required."
"The product has automated protection powered by AI/ML, which is now far more powerful than before. It uses AI/ML in its detection algorithm, providing fast and quick results."
"The solution provides AWS GuardDuty S3 protection, EKS runtime protection, and malware protection."
"Since our environment is cloud based and accessible from the internet, we like the ability to check where the user has logged in from and what kind of API calls that user is doing."
"We generally use AWS GuardDuty for detection of zero-day vulnerabilities and automatic threat responses; it serves as a SOAR, an orchestrated and automated response solution for us in the AWS platform."
"What we found most valuable in Amazon GuardDuty is its threat detection feature, especially because we were monitoring a huge number of AWS accounts, so we needed a solution that would monitor for any kind of malicious activity. The monitoring aspect of the solution was great because it gave us timely notifications if and when anything happened, and Amazon GuardDuty helped keep us on our toes to make sure we took action right away."
"The way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."
"The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms."
"Amazon GuardDuty is a very good service, and we are not planning to change it any time soon."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."
"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."
"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."
"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."
"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."
"The scalability of Cisco Tetration is very good."
"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in vulnerability scanning, particularly for PaaS environments. Currently, Qualys does not have full access to these instances, which limits its effectiveness."
"From a downside perspective, the UI is not user-friendly and feels dated compared to other tools like Prisma Cloud."
"Areas that need improvement in every solution include the remediation part. The remediation steps should be simple enough for everyone to understand."
"In TotalCloud, I would suggest improvements in policy checks to cater to various inventory types like VPCs, subnets, S3 buckets, or IAMs. There is a lack of data segregation according to criticality or inventory."
"Although TotalCloud is a helpful tool, some of its advanced features are still under development."
"There is room for improvement in the support."
"I would like the ability to disable certain default built-in policies as they can be misleading when creating dashboards. That is the top one."
"It has been working very well, but it would be helpful if the dashboard could generate reports tailored to specific compliance needs. For example, in India, we have to comply with RBI and SEBI guidelines. It w"
"We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved."
"AWS GuardDuty sometimes shows false positives and should have better detection accuracy."
"AWS GuardDuty needs to be more customer-oriented."
"The product needs to improve its cost-efficiency since it is expensive."
"I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use."
"I would rate Amazon GuardDuty seven out of ten because some of the integrations may not work well with it, and depending on the integration that you're working with, the security tools have a lot of requirements to implement."
"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."
"For the next release, they could provide IPS features as well."
"A feature that I was looking for was emailed alerts and notifications so we'd get them right away."
"The product should be easy to use, but it is not. Comparing it to other products, it was very complex."
"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."
"The entire interface could be improved; it's ugly and uninviting, and Tetration tends to be a lot more cumbersome and not very intuitive compared to the biggest competitor's modern-looking GUI."
"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."
"The product must be integrated with the cloud."
"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."
"Cisco Tetration needs more flags and system alerts that we should get with network capture."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers good pricing that is affordable and competitive with the market. Our partnership also provides us with additional benefits."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers cost-effective licensing flexibility."
"It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable. It helps us to manage things with very few resources."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."
"I prefer to have something on demand for myself. That's why I haven't been paying for GuardDuty specifically. AWS provides a wide range of offerings, especially in the security area."
"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 usage of this service, making it a recommended practice for security."
"I have heard that the solution's price is quite high."
"The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."
"The price of the solution is exactly right."
"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."
"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
To be totally honest, I do not have any best features because I have had a bad experience using this tool, especially...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is vulnerability management and exposure management. I use this tool to evalua...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon GuardDuty?
AWS GuardDuty is an expensive feature, and while you can't expect the price to be low, it can be lower because it's p...
What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?
AWS GuardDuty is a good product; it's doing its job right now, and I don't see any additional improvements needed. Co...
What is your primary use case for Amazon GuardDuty?
We generally use AWS GuardDuty for detection of zero-day vulnerabilities and automatic threat responses; it serves as...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?
CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?
When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and cre...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
No data available
Cisco Tetration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.