AWS IAM Access Analyzer vs Palo Alto Networks Cortex Cloud API Security

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.

Palo Alto Networks Cortex Cloud API Security discovers, ranks, and protects APIs across cloud environments. It can find and validate APIs across gateways, workloads, and cloud environments, including shadow, zombie, and unmanaged APIs. Configuration and traffic context inform risk rankings based on severity and potential business impact. Risk insights cover internet exposure, sensitive data transmission, weak authentication, missing encryption, and specification drift. The product describes real-time protection against OWASP API Top 10 threats, including injection, authentication bypass, and data exposure; teams can use monitor or blocking modes. Agentless integrations are listed for AWS API Gateway, Azure APIM, GCP Apigee, and Kong. Linux workload protection uses an agent and is marked Beta. Teams can import OpenAPI specifications to check live traffic for deviations and scan for misconfigurations or vulnerabilities. Azure APIM integration requires the Data Collection add-on and a running Azure APIM service. Cortex CLI scans require an OpenAPI file and Java 11 or later, while Web and API Security requires the Runtime Security add-on. Pricing is on request; the product page offers a demo request.