Key Takeaways
AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector is one of the most common comparisons cloud teams make – but they are not competing tools. They solve different security jobs and, when integrated, create a more complete and automated defense strategy. Understanding their distinct roles is critical: Security Hub focuses on posture, aggregation, and exposure correlation, while Amazon Inspector delivers continuous vulnerability detection across compute and code.
- Separate the jobs to be done: Security Hub is CSPM, aggregation, correlation with exposure findings; Inspector does continuous vulnerability management for EC2, containers, Lambda, code repositories.
- Treat them as complementary, not substitutes: Enable Inspector to send vulnerability findings to Security Hub, which correlates CSPM, Macie, and OCSF signals into exposure findings to prioritize remediation.
- Distinguish findings to drive decisions: Inspector surfaces vulnerability findings; Security Hub produces exposure findings and aggregates alerts to drive cross-account risk triage and remediation workflows.
- Prioritize exposure, not sheer volume: Use Security Hub’s exposure summary and internet-exposed assets views to rank what matters most across accounts and Regions.
- Standardize security data for automation: Security Hub normalizes findings using the OCSF schema, improving interoperability and enabling consistent automation across integrated services and accounts.
- Centralize operations where it scales: Use Security Hub for multi-account, cross-Region visibility, automation, and remediation enablement; keep Inspector focused on continuous scanning and vulnerability detection.
With these fundamentals established, the following sections walk through setup, integration flow, and operational patterns. Continue to see how to apply them in your environment.
Introduction
If you’re deciding between AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector, you’re framing the problem the wrong way. They are designed for different layers of cloud security: Security Hub focuses on CSPM, aggregation, and exposure correlation, while Inspector provides continuous vulnerability detection for EC2, containers, Lambda, and code repositories. Choosing one over the other means leaving critical visibility or detection gaps.
Treat them as complementary – enable Inspector to send vulnerability findings into Security Hub, which aggregates across services like Macie using the OCSF schema to standardize data. Use Security Hub’s exposure summary and internet-exposed assets to prioritize risk across accounts and Regions, while Inspector stays focused on scanning and surfacing precise weaknesses. That split keeps your teams aligned and your backlog sane.
This guide clarifies aws security hub vs. aws inspector: key differences for buying decisions – what each produces, how findings flow, and where to centralize operations. You will see how to standardize, automate, and triage at scale, then act with confidence. Let’s explore setup, integration, and operational patterns you can apply in your environment.
Core roles – Security Hub vs Inspector
Start here: these services solve different problems, and that is a good thing. Think of Security Hub as your central command center for cloud security posture and risk triage, and Amazon Inspector as your nonstop sensor network finding real software weaknesses. When you stop forcing a one-tool-to-rule-them-all decision, operations suddenly gets smoother and findings make more sense. When you weigh AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector, think in terms of complementary roles, not a binary pick.
Security Hub – CSPM and aggregation
Security Hub acts as your cloud security posture management layer and central aggregator. It ingests findings from native services, correlates them using common fields, and produces higher-level signals that answer the question you actually care about: where are we exposed and what should we fix first. When looking at AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector, this is the side focused on posture visibility and prioritization rather than vulnerability discovery.
Because it normalizes data into the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework, you can connect multiple signals without losing context, as described in the Security Hub features. A misconfigured S3 bucket from a posture check, a sensitive data discovery from Macie, and a vulnerability from Inspector no longer live in separate silos. In Security Hub, they become part of the same story and the same workflow, with consistent fields you can automate against.
Security Hub shines in multi-account and multi-Region operations. It gives you views that span your organization, central insights like Exposure summary, and automation hooks that work at scale. If you operate 50 accounts and three Regions, you do not want to click through them one by one. Security Hub makes centralized visibility, reporting, and response realistic instead of aspirational.
For instance, a platform team with many developer accounts can pull GuardDuty, Macie, and Inspector into Security Hub, then use delegated administration to manage standards and insights centrally. Moving from ad hoc Slack messages to a single risk queue with consistent severities and resource owners attached makes ownership obvious. Engineers finally know which tickets matter first.
Amazon Inspector – continuous vulnerability management
Amazon Inspector is built for one job: find vulnerabilities continuously across your compute and code. It scans EC2 instances for software CVEs, containers in ECR for image issues, serverless functions for package risks, and code repositories for dependency and secret problems. It is a domain expert focused on the nitty-gritty details of weaknesses and exploitability, not a general-purpose aggregator. Framed as AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector, Inspector provides the deep, continuous detection signal that Security Hub later correlates.
Inspector runs automatically as environments change. New instance brought online, new container pushed, or new Lambda version published? It assesses without you kicking off manual scans. That continuous model catches drifting risk that would otherwise slip in between quarterly audits or point-in-time checks.
The service also brings strong context about exploitability. Findings include CVSS scores, known exploitation indicators where available, package version data, and affected resources with tags. When it flags a critical vulnerability in a public-facing EC2 instance running an outdated OpenSSL, it is telling you exactly what and where to fix.
For example, a team shipping daily container images might assume their base image is fine. Inspector can flag a high-severity vulnerability introduced by a base image change from upstream. Catching it the same day and rebuilding with a fixed base beats discovering it in production a month later.
Workloads and resources each service covers
The coverage split is simple, but important. Inspector directly scans EC2 instances for OS and package vulnerabilities, ECR container images for CVEs and configuration risks, Lambda functions for included libraries, and supported code repositories for dependency vulnerabilities and hardcoded secret leaks. If it runs your code or ships your code, Inspector likely has a lens on it.
Security Hub does not perform vulnerability scans. Instead, it ingests signals from many places: Inspector vulnerability findings, GuardDuty threat detections, Macie sensitive data alerts, IAM Access Analyzer findings, and control failures from security standards like CIS and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. It then correlates these into exposure findings and actionable insights across your environment.
Put differently: Inspector tells you the software has a hole. Security Hub tells you whether that hole is facing the internet, sitting on data with PII, and connected to a risky identity path. When people compare AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector, this is the difference that decides workflows and ownership across teams.
In practice, most organizations turn on both. Inspector scans the software layer for EC2, containers, Lambda, and code repositories. Security Hub aggregates those results with posture and threat signals, and then helps you sort and act at scale. That complementary model is how teams avoid duplicate effort and missed risk.
Findings and prioritization – exposure vs vulnerabilities
Now let’s talk about the thing that actually eats your calendar: findings. The difference between vulnerability findings and exposure findings drives triage, ownership, and the order of your backlog. Framing AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector through the lens of findings clarifies who owns what and why.
Inspector vulnerability findings – resource context
Inspector findings are precise and resource-centric. A typical finding includes the CVE identifier, CVSS base score, a description of impact, the affected package and version, recommended fixes, exploit knowledge, and the exact resource ARN with tags. This level of detail supports immediate remediation without a lot of detective work. For AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector comparisons, this is the deep technical signal that maps straight to a fix.
Inspector also factors in whether a vulnerability is reachable or likely to be exploited in a given context where supported. For example, a high CVSS vulnerability in a package that is not present in the final container layer or not loaded by a Lambda function may be ranked differently than a publicly exploited CVE in a running process. You are not left guessing which finding is noisy versus truly urgent.
Because findings map directly to assets, ownership is straightforward. The EC2 instance belongs to a team with a cost center tag, the container image is tied to a repository, the Lambda has a function owner. That makes it easier to route tickets to the right people without six meetings and a spreadsheet hunt.
Practical scenario: Inspector flags a critical OpenSSH vulnerability across 12 EC2 instances tagged as prod and internet-facing. It ships the remediation guidance and affected resources in the finding. You open tickets for the owning service team with the patch details and a deadline. No committee needed.
Security Hub exposure findings and aggregated alerts
Security Hub findings sit at a higher level of abstraction. They roll up signals like misconfigurations, data sensitivity, and vulnerabilities into exposure findings. Within AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector debates, this is the layer that rolls context into one urgent picture.
Under the hood, Security Hub correlates data based on standardized fields, relationships, and resource identifiers. It sees your GuardDuty alert of unusual network traffic, your Inspector finding on the instance, and your Macie alert for sensitive objects in the connected bucket. The result is one aggregated alert rather than three disconnected ones that might be triaged by different teams and never stitched together.
This is where the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework matters. Normalized fields make correlation and automation consistent, and integrations behave the same across accounts and Regions. You do not have to write one workflow for Inspector JSON and another for Macie output. In Security Hub, they look and act the same.
In practice, teams often find that siloed alerts across several services shrink dramatically when aggregated in Security Hub. Reducing thousands of weekly alerts to a few hundred consolidated findings is common, with exposure findings that combine multiple signals. Triage moves from inbox chasing to a prioritized queue people actually trust.
Risk prioritization – exposure summary and internet-exposed assets
If everything is critical, nothing is. Security Hub’s exposure summary and internet-exposed assets views help you rank risk based on what attackers can actually touch. The Security Hub FAQs also explain how exposure findings are generated to spotlight the issues that matter.
When an asset is public, reachable, and vulnerable, it floats to the top. When it is internal and guarded, it is still a finding, but not your first page of tickets. Use these views to turn AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector into a partnership that ranks work sensibly.
These views are meaningful only when you feed Security Hub with enough context. Turn on Inspector, GuardDuty, and Macie, and make sure tagging is consistent so resource ownership is visible. For ongoing playbooks and field notes, explore our blog to keep your weekly reviews sharp.
Concrete example: on Monday morning you open Security Hub and filter by internet-exposed assets with critical exposure. You see a public ALB routing to a container service with an exploited CVE in its base image. That moves straight to an emergency change window, while an internal-only host with the same CVE moves to this sprint’s patch plan.
Integration flow – Inspector to Security Hub
The magic is in the flow. Inspector finds problems, Security Hub collects and correlates them, and your automation turns findings into action. The way you wire AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector determines signal-to-noise and how quickly work lands in the right backlog.
Enable findings export and OCSF normalization
Step one is enabling Amazon Inspector to publish its findings to Security Hub. In most environments this is just a toggle, and in multi-account setups you do it from the delegated administrator so everything flows to the same place. Once enabled, new Inspector findings arrive automatically, complete with resource ARNs and tags. This step cements AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector as a pipeline rather than two separate consoles.
Security Hub normalizes incoming data to OCSF so fields line up with other services. That consistency means your rules for severity, resource type, environment tags, and ownership work across Inspector, Macie, and GuardDuty findings. It also means analytics or SIEM exports downstream do not need a dozen brittle parsers.
Do not skip testing. Use a sandbox account, trigger a known Inspector finding on a test instance or image, and confirm you can see the same fields in Security Hub as you expect. Then write one simple rule that routes a critical Inspector finding in Security Hub to your ticketing system to validate the end-to-end path.
Tip from the field: enable deduplication in your downstream tools. Inspector updates a finding as the environment changes, and Security Hub will reflect that. A single ticket that updates with status beats five duplicates for the same CVE on the same resource and keeps teams from tuning out.
Aggregate Macie and GuardDuty for context
Inspector is stronger when you surround it with context. Turn on Amazon Macie to identify sensitive data exposure, and GuardDuty to surface threat activity. That context is what makes AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector more than a forwarding rule.
Once those feeds are in Security Hub, use tags and resource relationships to link them. Services running on public subnets with sensitive data behind them deserve faster action. Likewise, GuardDuty findings on a resource with critical vulnerabilities are a clear escalate-now moment. Simple correlation rules catch 80 percent of these cases without advanced analytics.
A quick example: Macie flags sensitive data in an S3 bucket, GuardDuty sees suspicious API calls to list that bucket, and Inspector shows a connected EC2 instance with a critical vulnerability. Security Hub correlates those into one exposure finding. You create a single escalation with a runbook to lock down the bucket policy, patch the instance, and watch access patterns for the next 48 hours.
This is also where standardized schemas pay off. Whether the data came from Macie, GuardDuty, or Inspector, fields like severity, resource, and account are coherent. Your automation does not care which service produced the alert, only whether the combined signal crosses your risk threshold.
Automation and remediation – tickets and actions
Finding risk is the easy part. Turning it into consistent action is where programs succeed or stall. Use Security Hub as the single broker that launches automation: create tickets, trigger runbooks, quarantine resources, or notify on-call. Treat AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector as the event broker plus action engine combination that routes the right work to the right owners.
Common patterns include opening Jira or ServiceNow issues from Security Hub with enriched context, invoking Step Functions to patch or quarantine resources, or posting to team channels with deep links to the exact resource. The more you can prefill ownership, environment, and remediation steps, the fewer back-and-forth comments you will have later.
Start with a narrow scope. For example, auto-create tickets only for internet-exposed assets with critical or high exposure. As teams build trust in the workflow, expand to medium findings in prod. It is better to grow confidence than roll out automation that everyone ignores within a week.
One rollout pattern that works: wire Security Hub exposure findings to automatically open tickets and kick off SSM patching for EC2 instances during a nightly window. Human review can still be required for prod, while most dev and staging fixes happen without manual steps. That shift is measurable in mean time to remediate and fewer late-night pages. For teams ready to automate these workflows and integrate them into broader CI/CD pipelines, our AWS & DevOps re:Build service can help you structure automation and remediation as part of your delivery process.
Setup and configuration – accounts and Regions
A clean setup pays dividends every day. The right account structure, delegated admin, and standards configuration make your findings flow and your dashboards meaningful. Think of this section as the quick checklist you will thank yourself for later. Good plumbing makes AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector feel seamless.
Enable Amazon Inspector for EC2, containers, Lambda, code repositories
In each account where you have compute or code, enable Inspector with organization-wide coverage. For EC2, make sure the SSM agent is running so patching and metadata are available. For ECR, integrate with your registries and turn on image scanning for push and periodic rescans. For Lambda, review layers and dependencies so you are not surprised by what is actually bundled at runtime. This is the AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector foundation – give Inspector coverage so Security Hub has signal.
If you scan code repositories, connect supported source providers and select which repos to assess. Start with your critical services and expand. Also set policies for pull request gates if your teams want to catch issues before merge. This is where developer experience matters: quick feedback on a PR beats a security email two weeks later.
Right-size your severity and suppression rules. Not every dev container build needs a critical page in Slack. Tag resources properly, align severities with environment tiers, and use Inspector’s suppressions for issues that are not exploitable in your context. Over-alerting is a fast path to alert fatigue and silence buttons.
Quick test plan: spin up a sample EC2 with a known vulnerable package, push a container with an outdated base image, and publish a Lambda with an old library. Confirm Inspector discovers all three and that they appear in Security Hub within minutes. Document expected results so teams know what good looks like before the first incident.
For ongoing operational tuning and long-term visibility improvements, consider AWS & DevOps re:Maintain to keep your posture aligned as your environment evolves.
Configure CIS and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices
Security Hub includes standards checks you should turn on day one, especially CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. These controls catch posture issues like overly permissive S3 buckets, weak IAM policies, or logging gaps. For context on why this matters in regulated environments, see The Crucial Role Of Compliance In AWS Fintech Security.
Treat control failures as part of exposure, not a separate compliance world. A missing CloudTrail in a Region is not just a checkbox problem – it cripples your ability to investigate and detect. Use Security Hub insights to track control failures by account and environment, and put them in the same remediation queue as everything else.
Standards configuration is also where you handle exceptions. If a research account must have public S3 for a dataset, document it with an exception and a time bound. Security Hub CSPM lets you mark findings as accepted risk with reasoning, which keeps your dashboards honest and your auditors happier.
Reality check: when teams turn on these standards, they often discover a handful of low-effort, high-impact fixes like enabling default encryption or turning on GuardDuty in all Regions. Knock those out early. It buys credibility and reduces noise in your exposure views.
Seen through AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector, standards surface posture gaps while Inspector findings highlight software risk, and Security Hub aligns both into exposure-led prioritization.
Cross-account permissions and delegated administration
In any organization with more than a few accounts, centralized operations are a must. Use AWS Organizations to designate a delegated administrator account for Security Hub and Inspector. If you want a structured health check against Well-Architected, consider our AWS & DevOps re:Align to benchmark where you stand and where to tighten controls.
Set up resource sharing and guardrails with AWS Control Tower or service control policies. The goal is to make it harder for an account to drift out of visibility. You want consistent onboarding so a new team does not accidentally launch an unscanned compute fleet or miss Security Hub enrollment in a Region.
Permissions hygiene matters. Use least privilege roles for Security Hub and Inspector to read findings, and separate roles for automation that can modify resources. Logging every automated change with CloudTrail and correlating back to the originating finding keeps your audit trail clean and your engineers confident in automation.
Pattern that works: a central security account owns exposure triage and automation rules, while each product account owns remediation. Security Hub sends the right tickets to the right owners with clear SLAs by severity and environment. Centralization is where AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector really pays off.
AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector – key differences
This is the part most teams search for, so let’s name it clearly. The comparison is not about feature checklists, it is about jobs to be done and how findings flow. If you need a crisp framing of AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector, anchor your decision in outcomes: posture and prioritization in one, continuous vulnerability detection in the other.
Choose based on jobs to be done
Inspector’s job is to continuously discover vulnerabilities and risky code across EC2, containers, Lambda, and repositories. It goes deep on packages, versions, and exploitability. Security Hub’s job is to aggregate, correlate, and prioritize across services, turning raw alerts into exposure findings that guide action.
So the practical choice is not Security Hub vs Inspector, but where each plugs into your workflow. If you only enable Inspector, you will see a lot of CVEs without broader context. If you only enable Security Hub, you will miss the underlying software issues entirely. Together, you get precise weaknesses and the exposure picture that decides what matters now.
Quick litmus test: does your team need to know which EC2 instances are running vulnerable OpenSSL today? That is Inspector. Do you need to know which of those instances are internet-exposed and accessing sensitive S3 buckets across five accounts? That is Security Hub. The difference between AWS Security Hub and Amazon Inspector shows up very fast when you frame questions like that.
If your stakeholders ask for an AWS Security Hub vs Inspector comparison for buying decisions, answer with the workflow map. Draw sources, aggregation in Security Hub, and the outputs to tickets and automation. When the picture is clear, the budget conversation gets much easier.
Centralize operations in Security Hub
Centralization is where Security Hub earns its keep. Multi-account views, cross-Region aggregation, standardized fields, and exposure prioritization are not optional at scale. Use Security Hub to drive organization-wide insights, reporting to leadership, and guardrails for automation. Keep Inspector focused on doing great vulnerability detection and feeding findings upstream.
This separation of concerns eliminates double work. You do not write a dozen direct integrations out of Inspector to every downstream tool. You integrate Inspector once to Security Hub, then let Security Hub normalize and route everything. OCSF-backed fields become the lingua franca for your scripts, SOAR playbooks, and SIEM pipelines.
It also makes compliance less painful. Security Hub’s standards results sit next to exposure findings in the same dashboards. When auditors ask how you prioritize remediation, you show exposure summary and internet-exposed assets to demonstrate risk-based triage, not just a long list of passed or failed controls.
Common pitfalls and decision checkpoints
There are a few traps that derail good intentions. The first is treating Security Hub as a replacement for Inspector. Security Hub does not scan your hosts, containers, or functions. If you skip Inspector, you will miss the vulnerabilities that actually need patching. The second is enabling everything without owners and tags, which guarantees noisy dashboards that nobody believes.
Another pitfall is prioritizing by CVSS alone. A critical CVE on an internal dev host is not the same as the same CVE on a public-facing production instance with a data path to PII. Use exposure findings and internet-exposed assets to sort the noise from the fires. If you are not using those views, you are leaving easy wins on the table.
Decision checkpoints to bake into your rollout: do we have delegated administration set up across accounts and Regions; are Inspector findings flowing to Security Hub and visible in exposure views; do we have at least one automated remediation path tied to exposure severity; and do tickets include owner, environment, and exact resource links. If any answer is no, pause and fix it before scaling.
One last note for searchers comparing AWS Security Hub vs Inspector: write down why you are integrating in the first place. If your goal is to reduce mean time to remediate for internet-exposed issues, measure that weekly and tune automation accordingly. The aws security hub vs. aws inspector: key differences conversation becomes straightforward when you align tools to a metric that matters, not just to a feature matrix.
Conclusion
AWS Security Hub vs Amazon Inspector solve different parts of the same problem. Inspector continuously identifies vulnerabilities with exploitability context across EC2, containers, Lambda, and repositories. Security Hub aggregates those findings with posture checks, sensitive data signals, and threat intelligence to produce prioritized exposure insights. Use Security Hub for visibility and orchestration, and keep Inspector focused on deep detection. Together, they deliver stronger, more actionable cloud security.
If you’re planning to implement or optimize either service, we can help you design the right architecture and automation strategy. Contact us to map your rollout, validate your setup, and build exposure-driven workflows that improve remediation speed from day one.
