Difference between Amazon GuardDuty and Inspector

Amazon Inspector and Amazon GuardDuty are both AWS services designed to enhance the security of your AWS environment, but they serve different purposes and have distinct features. Here’s a pointwise difference between Amazon Inspector and Amazon GuardDuty:

Amazon Inspector:

1. Security Assessment: Amazon Inspector is primarily a security assessment service. It focuses on identifying security vulnerabilities, missing patches, and compliance issues in your AWS resources.
2. Vulnerability Scanning: It scans your EC2 instances and other AWS resources for known vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and security weaknesses, providing detailed findings.
3. Agent-Based: Amazon Inspector uses lightweight agents that can be installed on EC2 instances to collect detailed data about the software and configurations running on those instances.
4. Custom Rules: You can create custom rules to assess specific aspects of your resources, allowing you to tailor the assessment process to your organization’s requirements.
5. Compliance Assessments: It evaluate your AWS environment against predefined compliance standards, helping you ensure adherence to industry-specific regulations and best practices.
6. Automated Assessments: You can schedule automated assessments at regular intervals or in response to specific events, enabling continuous monitoring of your security and compliance posture.

Amazon GuardDuty:

1. Threat Detection: Amazon GuardDuty is primarily a threat detection service. It continuously monitors your AWS environment to detect and respond to security threats and suspicious activities.
2. Anomaly Detection: GuardDuty uses machine learning and anomaly detection techniques to identify unusual behaviour, unauthorized access, cryptojacking, and other security threats in real time.
3. Data Sources: It analyzes various data sources, including VPC flow logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs, to identify potential threats.
4. Security Findings: GuardDuty generates security findings, which are detailed alerts providing information about detected threats, their severity, and recommendations for remediation.
5. Integration with AWS Services: It seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like AWS CloudWatch, AWS Lambda, and AWS Security Hub, enabling automated response actions based on threat detections.
6. Continuous Monitoring: GuardDuty operates in real-time, providing continuous monitoring and protection for your AWS accounts and resources.
7. Cost Structure: GuardDuty is billed based on the volume of data analyzed, making it cost-effective for monitoring large-scale environments.

In summary, Amazon Inspector primarily focuses on security assessments and compliance checks, while Amazon GuardDuty specializes in threat detection and real-time monitoring of security threats within your AWS environment. Depending on your specific security needs, you may use one or both of these services to enhance the security of your AWS resources and applications.