What is AWS Cloud Security? A Complete Guide

Security lives and breathes as the top primacy in every cloud conversion. Organizations are taking initiatives to deeply embed security into their culture and processes. Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the most secure cloud environments available today helps organizations to build their security baseline. 

AWS is trusted by millions of users including organizations that require stringent security, and compliance measures like government, financial services, and healthcare. This confirms that AWS cloud security is exemplary. 

Here in this blog, we will share detailed insights into Amazon Web Services including its benefits, tools, and best practices that customers can adopt to operate the security in their cloud environments.

What is AWS Cloud Security?

Put simply, AWS security refers to the actions implemented to ensure the security of the data stored in the AWS cloud. These actions include data protection from unauthorized access, and following the compliance, and legal requirements. 

Technically speaking, AWS cloud security is a comprehensive framework consisting of security tools, protocols, and services operating jointly with the vision of ensuring AWS-hosted data’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability. 

Security on AWS is a shared responsibility between the AWS and customers. Amazon Web Services is responsible for the heavy-lifting job of managing the core infrastructure that power all the services in the cloud. This infrastructure includes hardware (regions, availability zones, and edge locations), and software (database, compute, storage, networking). On the other hand, Customers are responsible for maintaining the security in their cloud environments. 

Customers’ security responsibilities include:

• All the customer data is hosted on the AWS cloud
• Platform, and applications
• Identity & access management
• Operating system, network & firewall configuration
• Client-side, server-side, and networking traffic encryption.

Benefits of Using AWS Security

Here is a list of the security benefits realized by customers using AWS cloud:

1. Complete Visibility and Data Control

The biggest concern with cloud security is that your data is stored in data servers that are out of sight. AWS is alleviating this fear by allowing organizations to have superior visibility and control over their data. 

You have complete information about where your data is stored, and who is accessing this data in real-time. AWS CloudTrail, a native logging service tracks the user’s activities and records the API calls across the AWS environment. This allows you to know who accessed what data, and when. So, if there is any suspicious access, you can preemptively act on it to maintain the data integrity. Additionally, with security automation, and activity monitoring you can ensure the detection of suspicious activities automatically eliminating the risk of activities being undetected.

All these elements of AWS security put you in great control of your organization’s biggest asset: data. 

2. The Gold Standard for Data Privacy

AWS is continually improving its capabilities of data privacy. It allows you to implement custom data privacy controls specific to your organization with the help of AWS access, logging, and encryption capabilities for how data is stored, collected, assessed, and deleted in AWS.

You can also implement data encryption keys fully managed by your security team, or by AWS. Over the years, Amazon Web Services has achieved several privacy information management certifications including  ISO 27017, ISO 27701, and ISO 27018. 

It also helps you maintain data sovereignty by allowing you to choose one or more regions to store your customer’s data. 

3. Automate and Reduce Security Risks

AWS allows you to automate security tasks to prevent delays and human misconfiguration errors. It has a set of integrated services and solutions that automate the security processes from detection, response, and remediation of security incidents.  For example, the machine learning capabilities embedded in AWS, automatically classify and protect sensitive data like personally identifiable information, payment information, health information, etc.

Amazon Web Services also allows you to automate infrastructure to apply security and compliance control. For example, AWS Config continually audits the resources and provides a detailed report consisting of compliance with both internal and external policies. Non-compliant resources will be detected immediately, and predefined actions can be performed like isolating resources, applying patches, and reverting to the compliance state without any human intervention. 

4. Global Network of AWS Security Partner

The biggest benefit of working with Amazon Web Services is gaining access to the thousands of certified AWS security services providers. These partners have deep expertise in the AWS ecosystem and can help you maintain security at every stage of cloud adoption. 

AWS Security Tools Helping to Achieve Security Objectives

AWS has a wide range of security-focused tools that help you to meet all your security needs. Here we have outlined some of the most common AWS security tools according to their use cases:

1. Identity and Access Management

Amazon Web Services has products and services to get complete control of identities, resources, and permissions for workforce and customer-facing applications.

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM allows you to manage access to the AWS services and resources securely at scale. With fine-grained access permissions and attribute-based control, you can specify who can access which resource or service. 

• Amazon Cognito

It allows developers to add sign-up, sign-up, and access control to their web and mobile applications in minutes eliminating the need to build complicated backend systems. Furthermore, by allowing hosting UI with personal branding. Embedding security features like risk-based adaptive authentication, and vulnerable credentials monitoring enhances the security. 

• Amazon Verified Permissions

A fully managed authorization service that provides developers with a centralized place to define and manage fine-grained authorization policies. These policies allow you to define who can do what within the web or mobile application. Amazon Verified Permissions facilitates the high-level granular, and context-aware secure access control.

• AWS Organizations

A policy-based management tool for centrally managing and governing multiple cloud AWS accounts organized into groups called Organizational Units (OU). 

• AWS Resource Access Manager

A resources management tool that allows the simple sharing of resources across different AWS accounts, or resources. It allows the centralized governance of the resources to ensure secure utilization and reduce the overhead cost.

2. Network and Application Protection

Amazon Web Services has a range of tools to apply fine-grained security policies at the host, network, and application levels. 

• AWS Firewall Manager

A security management service that allows the administrator to configure, and deploy the firewall rules across the application and accounts in the AWS environment.

• AWS Network Firewall

It works with AWS Firewall Manager and allows the configuration of fine-grained policies to control the network. These policies can be centrally applied on the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and accounts.

• AWS Shield

It is a managed DDoS protection service that identifies and remediates the denial of services (DDoS) attacks.

• AWS Verified Access

It allows secure remote access eliminating the need for a VPN by evaluating each access request in real time against the policies defined. 

• AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

It helps to protect web applications against threats that can impact the applications’ availability, and lead to unauthorized access to sensitive information. You can create a custom rule that will govern the bot traffic, and eliminate the potential risk for SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), etc.

3. AWS Detection and Response Services 

Detection and response services work together to detect and prioritize security events across AWS environments. 

• Amazon GuardDuty

An intelligent threat detection AWS service powered by machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence. It continuously monitors accounts, data, and workloads to flag potential threats that require swift remediation.

• Amazon Inspector

An automated vulnerability management system that automatically discovers the workload, and continually scans them to identify vulnerabilities and unintended exposure. It supports both agent-based and agentless vulnerability scanning.

• AWS Security Hub

A cloud security posture management service that performs automated security checks, and centralizes the security insights in one place.

• Amazon Security Lake

A fully managed AWS security data management service that allows you to analyze the security data from AWS cloud, SaaS providers, on-premises servers, and other cloud sources. It allows you to gain a complete understanding of security data at a centralized dashboard to manage and optimize the data.

• Amazon Detective

A security investigation and visualization service allows security teams to investigate the security risk with generative. It offers interactive visualizations to make it easy to understand the nature, and potential impact of threats more easily. 

• AWS Config

An AWS config tool, allowing you to assess, audit, and evaluate the AWS resources to strategically meet the organization-specific goals, and optimize the cost. It also helps in troubleshooting the configuration issues and solving them.

• Amazon CloudWatch

A monitoring, and observability service for all the resources, and applications hosted on the AWS, other cloud providers, and even on-premises servers. With detailed insights across AWS resources, you can visualize the performance gap, and execute predefined automated actions to changes. 

• AWS Cloud Trail

A secure standardized logging service that helps in monitoring user activity, and API logs from AWS cloud, on-premises server, and other cloud service providers. These insights help in configuration troubleshooting, flagging suspicious activity, and debugging applications. 

• AWS IoT Device Defender

It is used to secure IoT devices to provide detailed information about their health, performance, and vulnerabilities. This information safeguards your IoT devices from unauthorized access and suspicious activities. 

4. AWS Data Protection Services

Data is one of the most sensitive assets of every organization. AWS offers a comprehensive set of security tools to protect the data.

• Amazon Macie

A sensitive data discovery and protection service powered by machine learning, and pattern matching algorithms. It automatically discovers and builds the interactive map of sensitive data to find out the data risks to facilitate automated protection. 

• AWS Key Management Service

A secure key management service allows you to create, store, and manage keys to ensure robust data encryption for the data stored in the AWS cloud. It is a centralized place for monitoring the use of keys, setting policies, and revoking key access.

• AWS CloudHSM

It allows you to generate and use the cryptographic keys to securely sign, and secure the sensitive data on AWS cloud. It provides a dedicated single-tenant hardware security module (HSM) to perform cryptographic operations meeting the data regulations requirements. 

• AWS Certificate Manager

A certificate management service that is responsible for provisioning, managing, and deploying the certifications used by AWS and other integrated systems such as servers, IoT devices, and more. 

• AWS Payment Cryptography

A cloud payment hardware security module that allows secure storage, and management of sensitive payment information like card number, password, etc. 

• AWS Secrets Manager

A centralized cloud password and other credentials storage service to securely encrypt and centrally audit them to ensure maintain their integrity.

5. AWS Compliance Management

AWS offers comprehensive compliance controls meeting all the compliance requirements of its global customers.

• AWS Artifact

A self-service, go-to, centralized resource that provides on-demand access to the Amazon Web Services compliance reports. This prompts the understanding of the organization’s compliance posture, thus building confidence to operate risk-free globally.

• AWS Audit Manager

A single platform for organizations to identify their compliance posture, and the risk, so they can take the necessary steps to ensure compliance. 

AWS Cloud Security Best Practices to Build Stronger Security Foundation

As said earlier, AWS cloud security is a shared responsibility. As a customer, you’re responsible for playing your role with consistency. AWS cloud security best practices help you enhance your security posture. 

Implement a Strong Security Foundation

The seeds of greatness are sown in a fertile foundation. This seems true in the context of Amazon Web Services security. Security is built with every basic preventive measure internally that is often overlooked. 

The very basic, and obvious security best practice is ensuring only the authorized users can access the information, and to the extent they are allowable to. We often emphasize more on protecting the unauthorized access coming from external actors, having no or less control over the security risks posed by internal actors.

AWS allows you to enforce strong identity and access management principles, ensuring that only authorized persons have access to the information, and only in an intended manner. 

Implement the principle of least privilege backed by AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM). This will ensure that the users only have access to the information required to perform their jobs. Furthermore, you can enable the MAF (multi-factor authorization) for all IAM users to add an extra level of security. 

Proactive Threat Detections

The earlier you identify, the better you mitigate the risks associated with threats. AWS allows you to become proactive with threat detection by processing logs, events, and monitoring. It employs a continuous monitoring mechanism to inform you with real-time insights into the security posture of your AWS environment. 

You have to set up AWS security services like Amazon GuardDuty to continuously monitor your environment for malicious activities, and suspected behavior. Additionally, AWS-native tools like Amazon Inspector can help you find security vulnerabilities and deviations from security best practices to ensure swift remediation can be undertaken.

Establish a Lesson-Learned Framework

Amazon Web Service Cloud security is an ongoing process in today’s dynamically evolving landscape. You have to iterate the security on the outcomes of the incidents to protect the AWS environment from advanced threats and improve the security posture.

Establishing a lesson-learned framework ensures that AWS security mistakes are not repeated. The process of building such a framework starts with a structured process that includes incident documentation, root-cause analysis, and post-incident reviews. You can use AWS-native tools like AWS CloudTrail for logging and monitoring the account activity, and AWS Lambda for automated analysis and incident tagging. These security insights should be embedded into your security policies and training program for continuous improvement.

How We Can Help You to Maintain Security on AWS?

With the right AWS services and tools, you can adopt the innovation across your organization while maintaining security. To achieve this, an experienced, and certified AWS security specialist with deep insights into the security trends, and emerging challenges can help you maintain and continuously improve the security posture. Here at Cyntexa, we’re a team of certified AWS professionals working to make security a proactive approach rather than something that needs to be taken care of only when it impacts you. With a suite of services including AWS migration, application development, and managed services, we’re embedding security at every stage of your journey. Let’s connect with us to learn more about how we can help you secure your AWS cloud against today’s and tomorrow’s security threats.