AWS IAM Access Analyzer vs Datadog Cloud Security Identity Risks

AWS IAM Access Analyzer helps teams set, verify, and refine permissions toward least privilege. It examines external, internal, and unused access to AWS resources. External analysis monitors for new or changed permissions that allow public or cross-account access; internal findings identify users and roles with access to S3, DynamoDB, or RDS resources. Unused-access findings can identify unused roles, IAM user keys and passwords, services, and actions. The service can generate fine-grained IAM policies from activity captured in AWS CloudTrail logs, and policy validation supplies security warnings, errors, general warnings, and best-practice suggestions. Custom policy checks can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines before deployment. The analyzer also provides last-accessed information for services and actions from select AWS services and connects with AWS Security Hub CSPM and Amazon EventBridge for findings workflows. AWS says automated reasoning technology applies mathematical logic to assess permissions. Policy validation, policy generation, and external access analysis are provided at no additional charge. Other listed charges include $0.0020 per custom policy-check API call, $0.20 per IAM role or user per month for unused-access analysis, and $9.00 per resource monitored per Region per month for internal access analysis.

Datadog Cloud Security Identity Risks is a cloud infrastructure entitlement management product for finding and reducing identity risks. It scans AWS, Azure, and GCP for lingering administrative privileges, privilege escalation, permission gaps, broad blast radii, and cross-account access. Detections cover users, roles, groups, policies, EC2 instances, and Lambda functions. Access Insights shows which resources an entity can reach and which principals can reach them directly or indirectly. Remediation options include narrower policy suggestions, Datadog Workflows, cloud-console links, Terraform-generated GitHub pull requests, and Jira issues. AWS IAM Access Analyzer can supply unused-access findings for policy recommendations and permission-gap detections. Scanning is agentless, and Datadog says snapshots remain within the customer environment. Standard permission-gap detections cover 90 days; Access Analyzer can use 180- or 360-day periods. CSM Pro costs $10 a month per CSM host, while Enterprise costs $25 a month per host. A 14-day trial covers the product suite.