AWS IAM Access Analyzer vs Qualys TotalCloud

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.

Qualys TotalCloud is a cloud-native application protection platform for multi-cloud and container environments. It covers AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure through a single license, control plane, and TruRisk score. Its security domains include CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, CDR, Kubernetes and container security, IaC, SSPM, DSPM, and AI-SPM. TruRisk prioritizes verified, attackable exposures using exploitability, threat intelligence, asset criticality, and runtime context. FlexScan offers agentless, agent-based, network, and pipeline scanning. QFlow provides more than 300 automated playbooks and integrates with ServiceNow, Jira, SIEM, and SOAR platforms. Qualys says TotalCloud can assess cloud resources, including transient and ephemeral resources, in under 10 minutes. It also manages SaaS security posture for Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Zoom, and Google Workspace. Pre-built policy frameworks include CIS, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and NIST. A free license with limited API calls for control evaluation is listed; subscription pricing is available on request.