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WA7. Cloud providers comparison

Statement

Cloud computing has become commonplace for businesses and private individuals. There are a few cloud computing providers who gained world popularity, i.e. Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others. Conduct internet research for the most trusted and popular cloud computing providers, and:

  • Select two cybersecurity products and services of your choice, compare them and enter into agreements between them.
  • Elaborate on the advantages and disadvantages of each selected business.
  • List the businesses that offer better cyber security services and/or products And why?

Solution

Introduction

Cloud computing is the most popular way to do business operations nowadays; whether it is public, private, or hybrid cloud, it offers flexibility, cost efficiency, scalability, better collaboration, disaster recovery, and on-demand computing and storage resources. However, security is challenging in the cloud as cloud providers own the infrastructure and businesses do not know where their data is stored (Hashmi, Ranjan, & Anand, 2018, 2).

There are many cloud providers, but the most popular ones are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud. These cloud providers offer many services and products in the areas of computing, storage, networking, security, databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and many more. However, in this paper, we will focus on AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Task 1: Select two cybersecurity products and services of your choice, compare them and enter into agreements between them

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation (AWS, 2023, 3). It is a SECaS (Security as a Service) that is easy to enable and configure, and it integrates well with other AWS cloud services. It offers continuous monitoring for potential threats, machine learning (ML), behavioral modeling, and threat intelligence feeds from AWS and leading third parties, configurable automated responses, and great scalability. However, it is only available on AWS, and its prices are quite high (AWS, 2023, 3).

Azure Sentinel is the equivalent of Amazon GuardDuty for Microsoft Azure’s cloud-based infrastructure (Microsoft, 2023, 4). It is an intelligent, comprehensive security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response (Microsoft Azure, 2022, 5). It offers data collection from various sources (including on-premises and other clouds), threat intelligence, automated investigation and responses, and behavioral analytics.

To choose between these two services, we need to consider other factors; if the organization is heavily relying on AWS services, then Amazon GuardDuty is the best choice, otherwise, Azure Sentinel is the best choice as it can connect to more data sources. In terms of pricing, Azure Sentinel is more expensive than Amazon GuardDuty, but it is not as scalable as Amazon GuardDuty. In terms of features, Amazon GuardDuty offers more features than Azure Sentinel, but Azure Sentinel is more flexible and customizable than Amazon GuardDuty.

Task 2: Elaborate on the advantages and disadvantages of each selected business

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular cloud provider in the world, with over 200 fully featured services with dozens of data centers scattered across the globe (AWS, 2024, 1). Its advantages include popularity, a wide range of services, scalability, and compliance with lots of security standards. Its disadvantages include complex pricing, lack of flexibility, and lack of integration with other cloud providers.

Microsoft Azure is the second most popular cloud provider in the world, it is less popular than AWS, but Microsoft’s reputation and its close ties with big corporations and governments make it a strong competitor to AWS (Microsoft Azure, 2024, 6). Its advantages include a user-friendly interface, powerful CI/CD tools, and the ability to integrate with a wide range of Microsoft products. Its disadvantages include its defaulting to Microsoft products and Windows servers, extra training is required to use it, and it is not as popular as AWS.

Task 3: List the businesses that offer better cyber security services and/or products And why?

VMware is  a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps. It is a huge company that specializes in virtualization, computing, and security and was recently acquired by Broadcom for $61 billion (VMWare, 2023, 7).

Datadog is a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications; it is a SaaS platform that integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring and log management to provide unified, real-time observability of our customers’ entire technology stack. (Datadog, 2016, 8).

The main reason why these services are better at security than AWS or Azure is that they focus on a narrower spectrum of services, which allows them to focus on security more as opposed to AWS and Azure which focus on a wide range of services. Although most of the time all of these service providers can collaborate to provide a better security solution. Other service providers that offer better security include Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, and McAfee (Kenyon, 2022, 9).

Conclusion

The realm of cloud computing is huge, it includes lots of big players like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and many other smaller players. The competition and collaboration between these players improve the quality of services and products offered to customers. However, choosing one provider makes your business dependent on that provider as their services are easier to integrate, and less training is required. Finally, the security of cloud computing is still a challenge, and it is the responsibility of both the cloud provider and the customer to ensure the safety of end-users.

References

  1. AWS. (2024). what-is-aws. Amazon Web Services, Inc. https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/. ↩

  2. Hashmi, A., Ranjan, A., Anand, A. (2018, January 31). 7(1). Security and compliance management in cloud computing. International journal of advanced studies in computer science and engineering IJASCSE. https://my.uopeople.edu/pluginfile.php/1808722/mod_book/chapter/471234/unit%207%20Security%20and%20Compliance%20Management%20in%20Cloud%20Computing.pdf ↩

  3. AWS. (2023). Intelligent threat detection with Amazon GuardDuty. Amazon Web Services, Inc. https://aws.amazon.com/guardduty/ ↩↩

  4. Microsoft. (2023, September 8). AWS to Azure services comparison - Azure Architecture Center. Microsoft.com. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/aws-professional/services ↩

  5. Microsoft Azure. (2022). Microsoft Sentinel - Cloud-native SIEM Solution. Microsoft.com. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/microsoft-sentinel/ ↩

  6. Microsoft Azure. (2024). Cloud Computing Services. Microsoft.com.https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb ↩

  7. VMWare. (2023, December 11). Introducing VMware Cross-Cloud Services. VMware. https://www.vmware.com/ ↩

  8. Datadog. (2016). Cloud Monitoring as a Service | Datadog. Datadog. https://www.datadoghq.com/ ↩

  9. Kenyon, T. (2022, May 24). Top 10 cloud security companies. Cybermagazine.com; BizClik Media Ltd. https://cybermagazine.com/cloud-security/top-10-cloud-security-companies ↩

  10. Dignan, L. (2021, December 22). Managing the multi-cloud. ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-top-cloud-providers-of-2021-aws-microsoft-azure-google-cloud-hybrid-saas/ ‌ ‌ ‌ ↩