GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector, Macie, IAM Access Analyzer, Detective — AWS ships seven different security services, and most of them are good at what they're designed for. This page is about the other half: multi-cloud, real CIEM, JIT brokering, MCP-native Agentic security, Code Security, and a unified graph that ties the seven AWS services into one story instead of seven dashboards.
AWS shipped seven distinct security services. They're not placeholders — each is a real product with real engineering behind it.
GuardDuty has direct access to CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, DNS logs, and EKS audit logs — at AWS's data plane, without exposing any data to a third party. That's integration depth no third-party can match natively.
Many AWS security services start free or low-friction — Security Hub aggregation is free, Trusted Advisor is built in. For an early-stage team, "already paying for it" is a real advantage.
For AWS-specific threats (compromised IAM credentials, cryptocurrency mining on EC2, malware in S3 uploads), GuardDuty's detections are AWS's own threat intelligence applied at the data plane. Solid baseline coverage.
AWS native is AWS-only. The moment your environment includes Azure (most enterprises do), GCP, OCI or DigitalOcean, you need a control plane that lives outside any single cloud. Cloudanix is cloud-neutral by design — same product, same console, same graph across all providers.
IAM Access Analyzer surfaces external access paths and unused permissions — useful, but it's a permission analyzer, not a CIEM. Multi-account permission graphs, cross-account assume-role chains, group / SSO mappings, identity relationships across SAML / OIDC / IAM Identity Center — that's CIEM, and it's not what Access Analyzer is for.
AWS IAM Identity Center supports SSO and permission sets, but it's a directory and role mapper — not a JIT broker. Cloudanix brokers short-lived credentials at the moment of use for humans, service accounts, CI/CD principals, and AI coding agents via MCP. Standing privilege drops toward zero.
Claude Code, Cursor, Kiro, Codex — coding agents that hit real AWS APIs. AWS has no MCP-broker product. Cloudanix does. Without it, agents either hold long-lived IAM keys (audit nightmare) or run with developer credentials (worse).
RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift — none of them ship live DAM or keyless JIT access natively. CloudTrail tells you who connected, not what SQL they ran. Cloudanix Database JIT + DAM gives you both, with optional masking and anomaly detection.
GuardDuty in one console. Security Hub in another. Inspector findings, Macie findings, Access Analyzer findings, Detective investigations — five-to-seven consoles. Cloudanix ties all of them (plus everything non-AWS-native) into one graph, one query language, one workflow. That's not cosmetic; it's the difference between "noise" and "story."
Mapped against the AWS service that covers each capability. "AWS Native" here means using each AWS service as designed — no additional third-party stitching.
| Capability · AWS service | Cloudanix | AWS Native |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud posture (CSPM) | ||
| Misconfiguration detection · Security Hub + Config | ✓ Multi-cloud | ✓ AWS-only |
| Cross-account aggregation | ✓ One graph | Per-region aggregation |
| Multi-cloud posture | ✓ | — |
| Cloud detection (CDR) | ||
| Threat detection · GuardDuty | ✓ + UEBA | ✓ AWS-baseline |
| UEBA — per-identity baselines | ✓ | — |
| Investigation workflow · Detective | ✓ Graph-based | ✓ Per-finding |
| Identity (CIEM) | ||
| Permission analysis · IAM Access Analyzer | ✓ Multi-cloud CIEM | External-access & unused |
| Identity graph (humans + machines + agents) | ✓ | — |
| JIT broker for humans / service accounts | ✓ | IAM Identity Center is SSO, not JIT |
| MCP-native broker for AI coding agents | ✓ | — |
| Workload security (CWPP) | ||
| Vulnerability scanning · Inspector | ✓ + Runtime context | ✓ EC2 / ECR / Lambda |
| Container / Kubernetes runtime | ✓ | EKS audit log via GuardDuty |
| Code security | ||
| SAST · secrets · IaC scanning | ✓ | CodeGuru is partial; not full Code Security |
| Code-to-Cloud lineage (PR ↔ runtime resource) | ✓ | — |
| Data security | ||
| Data discovery / classification · Macie | ✓ | ✓ S3-focused |
| Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) | ✓ Real-time | — |
| Database JIT (keyless, audited) | ✓ | — |
| Compliance | ||
| SOC 2 · PCI · HIPAA · NIST · ISO | ✓ | ✓ Via Security Hub standards |
| DPDPA · RBI · IRDAI (India) | ✓ | — |
| SAMA · PDPL · UAE FDPL (Middle East) | ✓ | — |
| Operating model | ||
| One console, one query language | ✓ | 7 AWS consoles + SIEM stitch |
| Multi-account onboarding | Days | Org-trail + Hub config per service |
GuardDuty is billed per account per region per day, plus event-volume charges. Security Hub findings are billed per account per region. Inspector scans cost per asset per month. Macie scans S3 by GB. At a real-world multi-account, multi-region AWS estate, the native security bill is non-trivial — it's just buried inside the AWS bill rather than appearing as a security line item. The real comparison isn't "free vs Cloudanix"; it's "the actual AWS native run-rate plus the SRE time to stitch seven consoles and miss the cross-service correlations — vs Cloudanix as one platform with one bill."
What Our Users Are Saying
Cloudanix is trusted by security leaders worldwide to deliver proactive, reliable, and cutting-edge cloud security.
One day, I changed the password of a root account, and my CTO called me within less than a minute to confirm if I did so. I was not expecting a reaction this quick. He told me Cloudanix alerted him of this password change and that he wanted to confirm as it was a critical security notification. I couldn't believe it!
Compliance is one way of staying secure, but what I want is the ability to go deeper and attain 'true security.' Cloudanix provides us the capability to do so.
Cloudanix is building for the future of the cloud, which makes the product all the more desirable.
Cloudanix gave us the visibility we were missing. Being able to move from permanent access to a robust Just-In-Time (JIT) workflow has fundamentally changed our security posture without slowing down our engineering velocity.
We are excited to leverage Cloudanix's comprehensive multi-cloud DevSecOps solution to secure our production workloads on AWS. Cloudanix has demonstrated that it can solve many challenges that DevSecOps teams face while continually adding new features such as SOC2 compliance and drift detection.
Managing third-party partner access was once a major concern for our security posture. With Cloudanix JIT Cloud, we've effectively achieved zero third-party risk. We can now grant access confidently, knowing that it is temporary, audited, and automatically revoked, resulting in a 100% reduction in our privileged access exposure.
The snooze feature and responsible alerts have helped us save time and prioritize what to tackle first.
Implementing Cloudanix JIT internally allowed us to practice what we preach. By eliminating permanent access to our own clouds and databases, we've neutralized the risk of standing privileges, ensuring our own 'keys to the kingdom' are never left exposed.
The problem with permissions is a lot of times, the gaps are left open due to oversights from inside the organization itself. With Cloudanix's CIEM, we get a complete view of user permissions and access. This enables us to update the permissions, reducing the attack surface.
In the world of Fintech, trust is our currency. Cloudanix provided the frictionless visibility we needed to secure our EKS workloads across AWS, ensuring we stay audit-ready for SOC2 and GDPR without slowing down our engineering velocity.
Cloudanix delivered value within 5 minutes of onboarding. Continuous monitoring, timely detection, and excellent documentation helped us attain a great cloud security posture.
Technology strategies and business strategies are in a state of constant change which includes centralization and decentralization of responsibilities. Regardless of strategic shift, we still have intellectual property to protect. Cloudanix are critical partners for us in our public cloud security posture across our three cloud providers.
Cloudanix has been amazing. They opened up a common Slack channel with us — and it feels like we are talking to our own team and getting things done with Cloud security. The support team is always available, friendly, helpful, and ready to go out of their way.
Beyond just access management, Cloudanix CSPM has given us a unified view of our AWS environment. The real-time alerting and anomaly detection allow us to prevent any untoward activity before it happens, which is critical for a marketplace connecting 50+ financial institutions.
For a Fintech company, data is our most valuable — and most sensitive — asset. Cloudanix DAM hasn't just improved our visibility; it has given us control. The ability to mask data and prevent unauthorized queries in real-time is a game-changer for our compliance and customer trust.
Our clients, especially in the Middle East financial sector, demand absolute accountability. Cloudanix JIT Cloud has been a competitive differentiator for us, allowing us to provide secure, governed access to customer accounts that meet their strictest audit and compliance requirements.
Cloudanix is always on my team's lips because of its exceptional support. Be it a small or big query, Cloudanix has gone above and beyond to resolve them. This one's a keeper for us.
For a long-lasting partnership, great support goes a long way. Cloudanix has delivered exceptional support whenever required. Their edge is their team is always ready to go beyond to solve any issues that we have. This speaks volumes about the culture at Cloudanix.
Beyond the technology, Cloudanix feels like an extension of our own team. Their willingness to stand up a dedicated Middle East tenant for us and provide exceptional support at a sensible price makes them a long-term partner for Hugosave.
The real-time notifications that Cloudanix provides are a real lifesaver. Their adaptive notifications ensure that my team stays productive and doesn't get interrupted all the time.
The whole point in technological evolution is to help improve the world we live in. We must protect that and to do so requires an effective and efficient security strategy. The Cloudanix team helped make our public cloud security posture management strategy a reality. The symbiotic relationship we have allows for a continuous feedback loop which is how business should operate.
It depends on profile. For a single-cloud-AWS team with basic compliance and a strong SRE function comfortable stitching service outputs, the AWS native set is genuinely workable. The moment one of these is true, the answer changes: you're multi-cloud, you need a real CIEM, you need JIT brokering, you ship AI coding agents to production, you have DPDPA / RBI / SAMA compliance, you want one console instead of seven. At that point, AWS native is a foundation but not a finished product.
Yes — Security Hub does aggregation of findings into a single feed. Where it stops is correlation across services: tying a GuardDuty finding to the Inspector vuln on the same EC2 to the IAM permission that made the blast radius possible to the Macie-classified S3 the IAM role can reach. That's graph work, not feed aggregation. Cloudanix does it on a unified graph. Security Hub doesn't.
IAM Identity Center is excellent at what it does: SSO, permission sets, and SAML federation to your IdP. It is not a JIT broker. The difference: a JIT broker mints short-lived credentials at the moment of use, scoped to a specific request, with an expiry measured in minutes and an approval workflow over Slack/Teams. Identity Center provides standing permission sets you map to users. For real standing-privilege reduction — and for brokering credentials to non-human identities like AI coding agents — you need a JIT broker on top. See JIT →
Cloudanix exposes itself as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. When Claude Code, Cursor, Kiro, Codex or Aider needs an AWS API credential, the request goes through Cloudanix first — short-lived, intent-scoped credentials are brokered to the agent, risky actions can be gated on human approval, destructive ones block at policy, and every action is identity-stamped back to the human operator. AWS has no MCP-broker product today. Without one, the realistic options for agents are long-lived IAM keys (audit risk) or developer-shared credentials (worse).
No — Cloudanix consumes the same underlying signals (CloudTrail, VPC Flow, GuardDuty findings, Security Hub findings, Config rules) and adds the graph layer on top. You keep your AWS native services running. Cloudanix isn't a replacement for GuardDuty; it's the platform that turns GuardDuty + the other six AWS services into one correlated story, plus everything AWS native doesn't cover.
Security Hub ships ~200+ controls across the AWS-curated standards (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, CIS AWS, NIST 800-53, PCI DSS 3.2.1). Cloudanix covers the same standards plus the regional and industry frameworks Security Hub doesn't ship (DPDPA, RBI, IRDAI, SEBI, SAMA, PDPL, IRAP, APRA-CPS-234, DORA, NIS2). For AWS-only buyers in the US with US-bounded compliance, Security Hub's coverage is broadly sufficient. For multi-cloud or regional-regulator buyers, the gap is meaningful.
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