Cloud adoption is no longer just the domain of a small number of forward-looking enterprises. It’s becoming mainstream. But as more and more companies migrate to the cloud, the issue of security has become a key focus of attention in the IT industry. Cloud adoption is no longer just the domain of a small number of forward-looking enterprises. It’s becoming mainstream. But as more and more companies migrate to the cloud, the issue of security has become a key focus of attention in the IT industry.
As the leading player in the cloud infrastructure market, with an extensive ecosystem of third-party offerings, AWS gives users a greater choice of cloud protection tools than any other vendor. These are built according to best security practice and provide the appropriate security building blocks users should use to secure their deployments and fulfill their role in the vendor’s shared responsibility model, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their services and data.
This raft of tools can help you gain complete visibility and control over your AWS environment, automate processes and take fast remedial action when issues arise. In this article, we’ll share a list of key AWS native utilities, open source packages and leading AWS Marketplace protection tools.
AWS-Native Tools
An enterprise that’s relatively new to AWS should start by making use of the vendor platform’s native security tools. The following are just a few of the selected services that provide AWS users with the building blocks they need to build a robust and secure environment.
Network security – The standard set of features for building a secured network on AWS. These help you to control inbound and outbound traffic. You will start with a default virtual private network (VPC) and will have to manage and continuously monitor your security groups and Access Control List (ACL) configurations.
Backup & DR – EBS volume Snapshots and AMIs are important components that allow users to back up and restore applications and data. These are the baseline blocks that allow users to automate complete backup and DR processes.
IAM – Another fundamental service AWS provides in order to restrict and control access to user accounts. Over the years, this service has gradually matured and today is rich with features that allow highly granular policies, such as providing specific users with access to specific groups of resources and services. Learn more about managing cross account IAM roles.
Encryption – AWS provides the ability to encrypt EBS volumes and their snapshots to AES-256. The encryption occurs on the servers that host the EC2 instances, providing protection of data as it moves between EC2 instances and EBS volume storage. In addition, you should consider Amazon S3 SSE (server side encryption for protecting data at rest).
CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs – These are important logging capabilities that were released by Amazon only in recent years. With Amazon CloudTrail you’ll be able to log all your account API activities and with VPC Flow Logs to log and view your network traffic flows.
Open-Source Tools
Netflix – Over the last few years, AWS poster boy Netflix has made Simian Army open source. This includes solutions such as Chaos Monkey and Chaos Gorilla, which simulate instance failure and entire AWS zone failures in order to continuously test the self-healing and recovery processes. You can check out the complete Netflix OSS project on GitHub.
ELK – Standing for Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, this trio provides you with an easy-to-use log analytics system which considered to be the most popular project in the world of sysadmin and DevOps. Among the different log management solutions it supports, cloud security monitoring is of the most important ones. You can use it to aggregate CloudTrail and VPC Flow logs to quickly identify anomalies. Check out ELK on GitHub.
Snort – Snort’s open-source intrusion detection system (IDS) performs protocol analysis, content searching, and matching. This allows you to identify and receive alerts on attacks in real time, including malicious activities such as port scans. Learn how to use Snort.
AWS Marketplace Solutions
Over the years, as AWS evolved and grew to support enterprises, the following tools took off and are the most established and comprehensive commercial solutions dedicated to supporting Amazon users.
Dome9 Security Business Cloud – The easiest way to describe the Dome9 offering is by thinking about the challenge in controlling tens or even hundreds of security groups. Dome9, a veteran security solution in the AWS ecosystem, automates network security, with features including advanced remote access, and centralized security group management. Check it out.
Splunk Cloud – Splunk is a leading vendor in the world of log management. The comprehensive solution portfolio includes tools for building dashboards that facilitate security monitoring to support organizations with their compliance. Check it out.
Datadog – Datadog can be considered as a leader in the world of cloud operations monitoring. It offers advanced capabilities specifically for AWS that supplement CloudWatch. Today, with its enormous ecosystem and tools with which it can integrate, it provides a flexible solution for the IT admin, allowing them to customize their monitoring for their own specific use case. Check it out.
***NEW for joint N2WS and Datadog customers – you can now integrate the solutions and view your N2WS dashboard from your Datadog account.
N2WS Backup & Recovery (CPM) – And last but not least N2WS—a set of tools that are used by the largest enterprises in the world. We offer organizations running on AWS a complete backup and DR solution based on the AWS-native snapshots and AMIs. It enables one-click backup and restore of the complete application stack. Check it out.
Final Note
We’ve seen the Amazon ecosystem grow exponentially as enterprises have become increasingly more receptive to the public cloud. With this increased trust, cloud security solutions have sprung up and gradually matured, helping users fulfill their security responsibilities. And, as the incredible pace of AWS adoption continues, the need for these tools will only become more important than ever.
Start Protecting Your Cloud Deployment Properly
Start your free trial today to ensure implementing an automated robust, scalable, enterprise-class cloud backup and recovery solution.
Read Also
