AWS Security - definition & overview

AWS Security is the process of protecting your data, accounts, and workloads, either using AWS tools or third parties.

Cloud computing is reaching widespread adoption, and as it has picked up speed, many companies have changed their operations and practices to encourage continual innovation. For many, transitioning to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform has facilitated rapid movement toward a more agile delivery model.

However, AWS cloud computing brings sweeping changes to the business, and as a result, companies require a new set of rules and a different way of thinking about security.

Security and compliance monitoring is frequently the biggest barrier to cloud adoption. Administrators need to monitor user access, and platform configuration changes across all AWS and on-premises workloads. They must generate audit trails to demonstrate compliance with internal security standards and industry regulations PCI or HIPAA.

Maintaining security and compliance in the cloud is a significant challenge for businesses.

Pre-built apps and powerful machine learning algorithms automate cloud audits and quickly uncover compliance violations, outliers, and anomalies in real time.

Maintaining security and compliance in the cloud has been a major challenge for many businesses. Ensuring consistent security controls across hybrid environments requires new methodologies and best practices for security and auditing teams. However, forward-thinking cloud service providers, software vendors, and audit services firms have overcome many of these challenges.

You can now step into the AWS cloud and have the full visibility, control and compliance posture you have always desired. AWS Security Hub provides a comprehensive view of your security state in AWS and helps you check your environment against security industry standards and best practices.

Security Hub collects security data from across AWS accounts, services, and supported third-party partner products and helps you analyze your security trends and identify the highest priority security issues. AWS Security Hub uses service-linked AWS Config rules to perform most of its security checks for controls. Amazon Inspector automatically discovers and scans Amazon EC2 instances and container images in the Amazon Elastic Container Registry. The scan looks for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.

AWS Shield is a managed distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. It provides dynamic detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency.

AWS Secrets Manager is a secrets management service that helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources. This service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

Amazon Security Lake is a fully-managed security data lake service. You can use Security Lake to automatically centralize security data from cloud on-premises and custom sources into a data lake stored in your account. Subscribers can consume data from Security Lake for investigative and analytics use cases.

You must enable both services to activate this integration and add Security Hub as a source in the Security Lake console, Security Lake API, or AWS CLI. Once you complete these steps, Security Hub sends all findings to Security Lake.

Security Lake automatically normalizes Security Hub findings and converts them to a standardized open-source schema, called Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF). With Identity and Access Management (IAM) web service, you can securely control access to AWS resources. You use an IAM user to control who is authenticated (signed in) and authorized (has permissions) to use resources.

As you transition application workloads to AWS, you must monitor those services' delivery, performance, and security. Machine data analytics assist you by simplifying and accelerating your migration and enhancing visibility across hybrid infrastructures.

If a security incident or operation outage arises, your SecOps team needs insights to resolve the issue quickly. Lacking visibility into the stack often creates higher application latency and more system outages, which translates into poor customer experience and customer churn.

You need a scalable platform to draw meaningful insights from an ever-growing amount of logs. A comprehensive security platform centralizes all these logs, provides a simple search interface for users to look for standard exceptions, applies machine learning to detect patterns in behaviors, and helps users with insightful information to not only reactively fix the issues but prevent them from recurring.

A baseline level of security is built into the AWS offerings, but companies that deploy these services are responsible for securing the apps running in their AWS environments.

AWS provides vital cloud computing resources for more than a million organizations. So it shouldn't be surprising that each of these enterprises defines its own unique set of security requirements. Consequently, besides securing its physical locations and network and providing tools like AWS IAM, AWS Inspector, AWS WAF, or AWS KMS, there's no way for Amazon—or any single vendor, for that matter—to offer a one-size-fits-all protection package.

Instead, AWS customers can choose best-of-breed solutions from an array of dedicated security-focused providers.

Today, hundreds of vendors cover every possible cloud security posture management security angle for on-premises assets as well as cloud computing platforms such as AWS. Solutions targeted at AWS address one or more of several specializations:

• Network firewall
• Endpoint security
• Configuration assessment
• Identity and access management
• Log Analytics

Large businesses and other organizations that move their application workloads to AWS must also monitor the security of those services. To generate security insights, organizations need continuous intelligence about their cloud infrastructure in the form of real-time machine data. In addition to driving a competitive advantage, adding business value, and innovating, continuous intelligence allows organizations to monitor and secure the service delivery of their digital initiatives and workloads in AWS.

Sumo Logic's analytics platform is designed and delivered to mirror Amazon Web Services. We help organizations gain the instant visibility they require to confidently pursue and enable dynamic modern cloud applications. Data must be mastered, integrated, and analyzed to gain the situational awareness that drives a proactive security posture. Continuous AWS monitoring and real-time visibility from Sumo Logic help secure your AWS cloud apps.