Armor vs. AWS Control Tower

Armor gives you what you need to be successful regardless of technical ability. If you can maintain the systems yourself, you are definitely ahead of the game with their service. If you're not prepared to configure and maintain the systems, they do a pretty good job of getting it set up during the onboarding process so that you don't need to dig into the technical guts too much. If you find yourself in over your head, their support staff can handle it for you in most cases.

Incentivized

AWS Control Tower is great if you have multiple organizations or disciplines inside a company that needs to be separated for billing purposes or separation of concern. Multiple accounts is part of AWS's well-architected framework and are generally a good idea. AWS Control Tower makes central logging easy which enables those logs to be quickly picked up by a logging tool to provide even more reports and insight. For smaller organizations, AWS Control Tower may seem like an over-engineered solution

Incentivized

• Security - we have requirements met right out of the box and the implementation of new resources is done with security in mind.
• Speed - We can scale resources easy and the infrastructure is fast and efficient.
• Responsiveness - Support tickets are handled very fast with almost immediate solutions.

Incentivized

• AWS Control Tower integrates with AWS organizations
• AWS Control Tower provides Account Factory to provision preconfigured AWS accounts
• AWS Control Tower helps to isolate workloads and billing via AWS accounts separation
• AWS Control Tower supports data residency controls out of the box
• AWS Control Tower supports post provisioning actions to newly provisioned AWS accounts: for example it can trigger enabling VPC flow logs in the new account

Incentivized

• Authentication and access against the secure messaging portal is overkill when the response I'm logging in to see merely says, "yes, we have your message. An agent will respond shortly". There should be an option to receive updates like this through email.
• The online portal that allows us to clone servers is very slow to respond. More than once I've spun up an additional server due to the lack of visual feedback on the initial request.
• The web application firewall does not seem to be sophisticated enough to differentiate between logged in administrators and end users. We use a CMS system which allows admins to create scripts. These often get barred by the WAF even though they are not malicious.

Incentivized

• This level of abstraction leaves you vulnerable to not knowing exactly what's been created, and that can enable you to mess things up.
• Because it provisions things on your behalf, you might end up paying for resources you don't need.
• The import process of existing accounts, which we did not end up pursuing, is tedious and manual.

Incentivized

There is no way to easily close an AWS account whether it was created manually or via the AWS Control Tower. It takes too many steps to close it vs to provision a new AWS account

Incentivized

Approximately 50% of all messages we receive are automated. Either that an agent will be assigned, has been assigned, or a ticket is closed. I'd like to see more 'real' interaction, and less box ticking, though I appreciate process has to be followed. That's the one point off. Everything else is very good.

Incentivized

Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, but for us, the use case associated with AWS Systems Manager was a better fit for our specific needs and skillsets. We did not need everything that AWS Control Tower was doing for us.

Incentivized

• AWS Control tower allowed us to drop several third-party vendors for security appliances and logging, which saved us considerable funds.
• AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we spend deploying AWS accounts.
• AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we have to spend on quarterly security audits.

Incentivized