Amazon Web Services or AWS cloud is ruling the market trends of 2021. With the pool of benefits arises the responsibility to secure the user’s data on the cloud. In the past few years, more and more businesses are migrating to AWS cloud, thus making AWS cloud security a crucial affair in the cybersecurity environment. AWS cloud security is a collective responsibility of both users and AWS.
Let’s take a glance at the ten best practices to secure AWS Cloud and get a thorough understanding of the implementation of each.
1. Implement Security As A Part Of Cloud Planning
Righteous and strategic planning saves a handsome amount of time and money. Implementing security as a part of your cloud planning is the principal practice to ensure that it gets implemented immediately. In the later parts of your project, this strategy will be beneficial as it will help you analyze how well it works for the overall cloud strategy, and you can adjust it accordingly. Cloud security planning must come into existence the moment you consider moving to the cloud. Additionally, giving preference to security strategy in the first place helps you with continuous deployment. The shared responsibility model can be applied using AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF). WAF also helps implement a comprehensive strategy that comprises data protection, compliance validation, logging and monitoring, Identity and Access Management (IAM), infrastructure security and resilience.
2. Apply Security To All Layers
The following best AWS security practice after setting up security as a crucial part of your cloud planning is, applying security in every layer. Also known as “Defense-in-depth,” this approach uses multiple mechanisms to secure your cloud environment. For example, just one firewall in the infrastructure does not do any good to your system. The ideal approach is having virtual firewalls on all the virtual networks to monitor and control the network traffic and secure the infrastructure and operating system running on it. AWS WAF is one such security solution that helps you control network traffic effectively. With AWS WAF, you can control traffic to your applications using security rules based on attack patterns with an independent firewall at each layer. WAF also enables you to set up custom rules that exclude certain traffic patterns. Managed rules and pre-configured help you set up a web application firewall quickly and easily. Third party services can also be integrated with AWS to apply security to network layers.
3. Create Comprehensive Security Policy
Creating policies around security and keeping them up to date is next in the queue! As mentioned earlier , cloud security is a shared responsibility of the customer and AWS. Nonetheless, AWS offers a rich ecosystem of security features for safeguarding the Cloud; it remains the responsibility of the users to create policies that enforce security in the cloud and protects their infrastructure. The best practice is to involve the security team in setting the policies and ensure a regular review of the documents for the latest security updates. Embracing all the measures that encompass AWS accounts, roles, and users will help the cloud security system function properly.
With the Center for Internet Security(CIS) benchmark, AWS provides well-defined and unbiased best practices to help organizations access and improve their security. The CIS AWS foundations benchmark comprises four sections that include identity and access management, logging, monitoring, and networking. AWS security best practices establish well-defined and reliable guidelines for ensuring continuous compliance, security and access management. Another significant influencer is setting your objectives with a security baseline with the goal of meeting them and ensuring they are followed diligently.
A combination of these help define reliable and robust security policy and enable a wide variety of tools that ensure continuous compliance.
4. Least Privilege Policy
Neglecting user access is among the common mistakes made on AWS. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to monitor user access to the database and discover their purpose. However, you can ensure that access to the cloud environment is restricted to authorized users only with AWS access control policies. Limiting the users to create accounts with an email address and affixing policies to the individual users is one of the effective measures to implement user access control. The least privileged policy with continuous evaluation includes log analysis, access evaluation, SIEM tool. Moreover, if there is a usage of external data sources for the applications, controls such as data-integrity validation and data-in-motion encryption are a savior.
5. Backup Data Regularly
Regular data backup is a must and is still overlooked by the customers. With the help of AWS security services, you can backup your data regularly on the cloud. These solutions help you manage and automate backups across AWS services. Data backup on a regular basis is a must and an exigent practice for all organizations. Your IT setups, nature of data, and industry requirements are synonymous with the organization's backup strategy. Data backup is an essential part of security. Having clean data is a wiser choice than trying to extract dangerous scripts from the file. Data backups can be a safeguard against ransomware attacks and help the company bounce back from the data loss incident. With variegated AWS solutions like AWS Backup, Amazon RDS, AWS Storage Gateway, and others, you can perform backups for databases, strong volumes, and file systems.
6. Security Incident Response
Security Incident Response mainly refers to an organized approach that is used to address and manage the aftermath of a security breach or cyber attack. It handles the situation in a way that minimizes the damage, recovery costs, and time. If the server is compromised, it isolates and protects the data even when a few components get compromised. Restoring a backup in AWS backup, a new restore with the backup that you are restoring is created, and for each restore, parameters are specified. The service-specific restore parameters are present automatically in case of restoring a backup using AWS backup console. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Storage Gateway, Amazon Elastic Block Storage and Amazon Glacier are a few AWS tools that are used for restoring a backup. AWS integrates well with other external data backup tools as well.
7. Data Encryption
Make data encryption a rule! Even if a hacker tries to enter your cloud environment, the encrypted data forms a shield of defense to safeguard your information. AWS offers AWS encryption tools that use scalable key management that supports various operations with encryption keys like rotation, creation, and auditing. Encrypting data helps you to ensure that sensitive data is saved and not readable by any user without a validation key. Key Management Service (KMS) allows you to encrypt sensitive data and retrieve encryption keys in AWS.
AWS KMS is integrated with AWS cloud trail! So you can monitor who used which keys, for which resources, and when. AWS services use the TLS protocol that provides encryption between your application and AWS service. AWS KMS manages HSM’S on the customer’s behalf, which further gives them the ability to manage their own HSM’s. With each AWS service, you can handle customer data, encrypt data in motion, and grant options to encrypt data at rest. AWS cryptographic services include Amazon Secrets Manager, Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Encryption SDK. Each service creates a key on your behalf, or you can import a key from your system that will be used by each service.
8. Implement Strong Network Security Protocols
Security controls offered by AWS alone are not sufficient to protect your network completely. A “Shared Responsibility Model'' is an impeccable practice to ensure AWS cloud security. It defines the user’s responsibility aside from Amazon’s security. Early involvement of the security team during the process ensures that security practices are taken into consideration from day one. Identity federation in AWS is a system of trust between two parties that is used for authenticating the users and conveying the required information needed to authorize their access. AWS supports commonly used open identity standards, including Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and OAuth 2.0. Active Directory Federation Service ( ADFS) in AWS is a web service that allows sharing of identity information outside a company’s network. It can be accessed with the usernames and passwords of the users. IAM identity providers can be used for managing user identities outside AWS and grant permissions to users for accessing AWS resources.
Concluding Thoughts
With the growth of existing AWS, rises the need to take an abysmal gaze into the security of AWS infrastructure. There exists an utmost need for the users to stay updated about the latest changes and adopt more comprehensive security measures. Organizations can take advantage of AWS services to maximize their agility by adopting effective AWS cloud security practices.
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