AWS Security Best Practices to Follow

06May

Major cloud solutions, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), enable businesses to use flexible and scalable computing resources at a fraction of the cost of doing so in-house. However, while enterprises are swift to accept the use and advantages of cloud-based infrastructure, cloud security infrastructure frequently falls behind, resulting in widespread data breaches and other cloud security incidents. To secure the organization’s AWS deployment against cyber attacks, you must address these knowledge gaps.

1. Common Challenges in AWS Security

Many enterprises are having difficulty implementing effective cybersecurity in cloud environments. The following are four of the most prominent challenges when it comes to securing cloud infrastructure:

2. Understanding Responsibilities

Cloud service providers (CSPs) determine a shared responsibility model that describes which security responsibilities refer to the CSP, cloud customer, and which are shared among them. Because of a lack of understanding of this model, security gaps will arise, causing a cybersecurity risk and exposing the company and its data to attack. To minimize risk in the cloud, organizations must understand their CSP’s shared responsibility model and create strategies for fulfilling their responsibilities.

3. Maintaining Visibility

Many companies have several cloud deployments, and enterprises frequently suffer from “shadow IT”, where workers set up cloud deployments without IT information. All of these factors make determining what IT teams need to track challenging. Cloud properties are often provisioned and decommissioned at a rapid and wide-scale, making it impossible to track and manage them.

4. Meeting Compliance Requirements

Most enterprises are subject to several distinct regulations that direct how confidential customer data should be saved and protected against unofficial access and disclosure. In the cloud, where an organization does not own direct or visibility control over its infrastructure, maintaining, achieving, and proving compliance can be further complex. Companies must define the administrative requirements for their digital infrastructure and assure that their cloud workloads and assets fulfill these requirements.

5. Enforcing Consistent Security Policies

Each cloud environment has its security configurations, and most enterprises use at least two public clouds. Since cybersecurity personnel must individually configure and manage configurations per each unintegrated environment, applying uniform security policies throughout all environments becomes more challenging. The deployment of a standardized security management platform capable of interfacing with and managing cloud-based security solutions with all of an organization’s cloud-based deployments is required to enforce effective security policies.

6. AWS Security Best Practices

It can appear difficult to achieve strong cybersecurity in the cloud, but it is not impossible. It is possible to enhance the security of an AWS deployment by following AWS security best practices guidelines.

7. Identify Security Requirements:

Define and Categorize Assets in AWS:
It’s hard to protect networks you don’t know exist. Identifying your assets and arranging them into categories based on their intent is the first step in enhancing the security of your AWS deployment.

Create Classifications for Data and Applications:
After the identification of all AWS assets, the category of assets or each asset should be given a security designation depending on the sensitivity and value of the data and capability associated with it. These classifications assist in determining the extent of surveillance and security measures required by each asset.

8. Deploy Solutions Designed to Resolve Cloud Security Challenges

Cloud-based infrastructure needs distinctive security procedures and tools than on-premises, traditional environments. Implementing security solutions designed for the cloud is fundamental to efficiently securing an enterprise AWS deployment:

Manage Cloud Access
Use Cloud-Native Security Solutions
Protect All Your Perimeters and Segment Everything

9. Maintain a Consistent Security Posture Throughout AWS Deployments

Amazon provides several distinct built-in security tools and configurations to help preserve their AWS consumers against cyber threats. Configuring these settings appropriately is crucial for maintaining a consistent cloud security posture across an organization’s AWS deployments:

Manage AWS accounts, Groups, IAM Users, and Roles
Manage Access to Amazon EC2 Instances

10. Protect AWS Workloads

Serverless and containerized deployments are rapidly being used to deploy cloud-based microservices in companies. These distinct architectures necessarily require security that customized to their specific requirements, such as cloud workload protection:

Implement Cloud Workload Protection for Containers and Serverless

11. Implement Proactive Cloud Security

Many enterprises have a preventive cybersecurity strategy of monitoring, responding only after a cyber attack has been detected on their network. However, delaying incident response activities brings the company at risk. To implement more effective vulnerability prevention within their cloud-based architecture, an enterprise should take the following steps:

Subscribe to Threat Intelligence Feeds
Perform Threat Hunting in AWS
Define Incident Response Policies and Procedures

12. Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Most companies are directed to several regulations that determine how they require to preserve confidential customer information in their possession. These regulations apply to a company’s cloud infrastructure, so companies can take the following steps to ensure that they’re in compliance with these regulations in the cloud: