What You Need to Know About Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Security

One of the highest priorities of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the security of its cloud infrastructure. AWS clients benefit from a network architecture and data center that was designed from the ground up to meet the stringent requirements of the most security-conscious organizations.
AWS Cloud allows enterprises to innovate and scale in a secure environment. There are strong safeguards in place to ensure client privacy and the on-demand pricing means that enterprises only pay for the services they use, removing the higher upfront costs of an on-premises environment.

Compliance Requirements

Using AWS enables organizations to effortlessly meet compliance requirements. The infrastructure manages several compliance and regulatory programs, ensuring the completion of most enterprise compliance segments.

AWS Security Services

AWS provides several security services and capabilities, including:

  • connectivity options that enable dedicated or private connections from offices or on-premises environments;
  • encryption in transit with TLS across all services; and
  • web application firewall capabilities that enable organizations to create private networks and control access to their applications and instances.

Amazon CloudWatch

A monitoring and management service designed for IT managers, site reliability engineers (SRE), system operators, and developers, Amazon CloudWatch provides complete visibility into AWS applications and resources. It provides organizations with data and actionable insight that enables them to gain an overall view of operational health, optimize resource utilization, and understand/respond to changes in system-wide performance. With an Amazon CloudWatch Events integration, IT teams can define workflows that automatically execute when the system detects an event that could result in security vulnerabilities.

AWS CloudTrail

The CloudTrail service enables risk auditing, operational auditing, compliance, and governance of AWS accounts. Using AWS CloudTrail, enterprises can log and continuously monitor account activity across their AWS infrastructure.
Other AWS security services include:

  • AWS Web Application Firewall
  • AWS Key Management Service
  • AWS Single Sign-On (SSO)
  • AWS Secrets Manager
  • Amazon Inspector
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Amazon GuardDuty
  • AWS Firewall Manager
  • Amazon Cognito
  • AWS CloudHSM
  • AWS Certificate Manager
  • AWS Artifact Portal

Conclusion

Despite the need for cloud-native visibility into activity and behavior across AWS environments, many organizations have still not implemented best practices for AWS security.
With the growing complexities of today’s cybersecurity landscape, compliance requirements, and use cases, enterprises need to understand how AWS protects and secures their data. This will enable them to make informed decisions on whether or not to move to (or expand on) AWS.
To prevent cyber threats and ensure the proactive protection of sensitive enterprise data no matter where they live on the cloud, enterprises should consider the use of a CASB. Click here to learn more about NEXTGen Cloud Security and why it is essential to the security of your cloud data, or contact us to schedule a free consultation.