Summary
Take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) benefits with security in mind. While moving to the cloud offers efficiencies and flexibility, AWS security presents a new set of challenges.
- Why Move to the Cloud?
- Do AWS cloud security challenges differ from on-premises security?
- Learn 5 steps for better AWS Cloud adoption.
Why Organizations are Moving to the Cloud
AWS provides scalable cloud infrastructure for hosting, running, and managing business applications. Flexibility via on-demand deployments helps you respond quickly to shifting market demands, driving new and expanded cloud workloads. A vast catalog of AWS platform services can be used in conjunction with infrastructure services to speed development so you can go to market faster than ever before. However, it is important to include security as you plan your cloud journey.
AWS advocates its shared responsibility model where AWS provides security of cloud data centers and access controls, but you are responsible for architecting, deploying, configuring, and maintaining the security of your resources in the cloud.
AWS Cloud Security Challenges
Moving to the cloud enables business growth but requires additions and changes to your security program before, during and after cloud migrations. A sound security posture is a must, regardless of whether data is stored on-premises or in the cloud, but securing cloud deployments requires special security knowledge. It is critical to start by building a cloud security management program that aligns your security and business goals.
You must understand the changing threats affecting cloud deployments and identify which of your existing security tools also protect cloud environments and assets. You need the ability to detect vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the cloud, identify the potential impact of any security issues discovered, and to make sure cloud security programs continue evolving and improving as your presence in the cloud expands. Applying security best practices provides long-term benefits by not only safeguarding assets today, but also providing a framework for cloud security policies moving forward. This includes ensuring cloud configurations are optimized with security in mind and performing ongoing security assessments of resources in the cloud. Don’t assume your on-premises security model translates directly to AWS cloud security.
5 Steps to Better AWS Cloud Security
The adoption of cloud-based environments presents a new set of challenges when it comes to security, leaving organizations to balance the benefits and speed of cloud adoption with processes to secure assets and data from an ever-changing threat landscape. These 5 tips will help you move to AWS with security in mind:
- Learn from your peers – Widespread cloud adoption gives you the opportunity to hear how other organizations have secured the cloud, including missteps you can avoid.
- Plan your AWS architecture with security in mind – A Cloud Security Architecture Assessment provides an in-depth, expert-led assessment of your cloud security program, leveraging proprietary and industry best practice, to outline and guide actionable next steps to improve your cloud security posture.
- Identify and prioritize vulnerabilities in the cloud – Use a strong risk-based vulnerability management solution to discover assets in the cloud, scan them for vulnerabilities, and prioritize and automatically rank vulnerabilities based on risk. Secureworks® Taegis™ VDR can also ingest information from third-party tools, including Amazon Inspector, and apply risk-based prioritization to that data.
- Periodically review your AWS cloud configuration – A cloud configuration review helps assure your cloud environment against common configuration-based vulnerabilities and delivers prioritized recommendations to help you operate more securely in the cloud.
- Correlate your AWS data with other security data – Leverage a security analytics platform like Extended Detection and Response to automatically ingest and correlate data across endpoint, network and cloud. Secureworks® Taegis™ XDR ingests data from Amazon GuardDuty, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), Application Load Balancer (ALB), VPC Flow Logs, S3 Data Events, Endpoint Agents and AWS Data Collectors. We correlate this AWS data with other security data to detect a wide range of threats and maximize your AWS cloud readiness.