Cloud security doesn’t fail because of missing tools — it fails when alerts don’t turn into answers fast enough.
AWS provides two powerful services that solve different parts of the same security problem:
- AWS Security Hub → Centralized detection & compliance
- Amazon Detective → Deep investigation & root-cause analysis
Used together, they create a complete detection → investigation workflow.
🔍 The Problem: Too Many Alerts, Too Little Context
In real-world AWS environments, security teams face:
- Hundreds of findings across accounts & regions
- Alerts from GuardDuty, Inspector, IAM Access Analyzer
- Manual log analysis across CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs
This leads to:
- 🚨 Alert fatigue
- 🕒 Slow incident response
- ❌ Unclear blast radius
🧠 What is AWS Security Hub?
AWS Security Hub acts as a centralized security posture dashboard.
Key capabilities
- Aggregates findings from:
- Amazon GuardDuty
- Amazon Inspector
- IAM Access Analyzer
- AWS Firewall Manager
- Continuous compliance checks (CIS, AWS FSBP)
- Multi-account and multi-region visibility
- Supports automation using EventBridge
Limitation:
Security Hub tells you what happened, but not always why.
🕵️ What is Amazon Detective?
Amazon Detective helps security teams investigate incidents faster.
Why Detective matters
- Automatically ingests:
- AWS CloudTrail
- VPC Flow Logs
- GuardDuty findings
- Builds a behavior graph of users, IPs, and resources
- Visual timelines and relationship mapping
- No manual log correlation required
Think of Detective as your cloud forensics engine.
🔗 How Security Hub Integrates with Detective
The integration is automatically enabled when you enable the Detective service. No other configuration besides turning on the service is required
End-to-end workflow
- GuardDuty detects suspicious activity
- Security Hub aggregates and normalizes the finding
- One-click investigation opens in Amazon Detective
- Deep analysis of API calls, network traffic, and resources
- Confirm severity and trigger remediation
This dramatically reduces MTTR (Mean Time to Respond).
Example: IAM Credential Compromise
Scenario:
GuardDuty reports unusual IAM credential usage from a new location.
Without Detective
- Manual CloudTrail analysis
- Time-consuming IP validation
- Delayed containment
With Security Hub + Detective
- Open finding directly in Detective
- View login history and API activity
- Identify affected resources immediately
High-Level Architecture
GuardDuty / Inspector / IAM Access Analyzer
↓
AWS Security Hub
↓
Amazon Detective
↓
SOC / IR Team / Automation
📊 Why the Integration Matters
| Capability | Security Hub | Detective | Combined |
|---|---|---|---|
| Detection | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Aggregation | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Investigation | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Visualization | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Faster MTTR | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | 🚀 |
✅ Best Practices
- Enable Security Hub organization-wide
- Enable Detective wherever GuardDuty is active
- Use EventBridge and Lambda for automated response
- Focus on high-severity findings
- Regularly test investigation workflows
🎯 Final Thoughts
AWS Security Hub answers:
What security issues exist in my AWS environment?
Amazon Detective answers:
What actually happened and how bad is it?
Together, they turn alerts into answers.
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