Top 15 AWS Security Tools

AWS Security Services: The Top 15 AWS Security Tools a Business Need!

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There’s no question that Cloud Computing has enticed the IT world with its potential business benefits. It bestowed powerful opportunities on businesses and empowered them to operate with great agility, adaptability, scalability, and resilience. In recent years, many organizations worldwide have already climbed the cloud bandwagon to tap the hidden potential. And the pandemic has further fueled the adoption pace.

Although the cloud enables a business to transform and innovate, there are pitfalls to cloud migration. Security and compliance risk is the greatest roadblock to cloud adoption. Combined with the complexity of the cloud, lack of visibility, control, and expertise, security remains to be the greatest cloud inhibitor.

Taking due cognizance of this cloud-security conundrum, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading cloud services provider, has developed a host of AWS Security services and tools to help businesses to secure their cloud environments. These security services enable organizations to scale security with superior visibility and control, reduce security risk with deeply integrated services, and meet core security and compliance requirements with ease

Let’s deep dive to know everything about AWS Cloud Security:

What is AWS Cloud Security?

AWS offers a wide range of cloud security services and features, including encryption, key management, and identity and access management (IAM), that businesses can leverage across their environments. While many AWS security services integrate with resources across the cloud environment, some also support on-premises resources.

However, businesses must take heed of the fact that AWS cloud security is a shared responsibility model. AWS only manages cloud security for its own infrastructure. The businesses alone are responsible for the security of their data and applications, user authentication and access, operating systems, networks, and third-party integrations. Though AWS facilitates features and tools to help businesses meet their security requirements, the responsibility for configuring them lies with the customers.

So, how businesses can ensure these AWS security services are implemented effectively? Feeling Baffled? Don’t worry, Continuum Innovations can help!

As a leading AWS cloud services provider, we can help you choose and integrate the right AWS cloud security tools that best suit your unique business needs. Reach out to our cloud experts and integrate security into every phase of your cloud journey.

To make things easy for you, we bring here the top AWS security tools that every business must integrate into their existing infrastructure to secure their workloads and applications on the AWS cloud:

The Best 15 Security Tools to Safeguard Your AWS Cloud

In a bid to ensure complete security coverage across the cloud environment, AWS offers security tools that cover multiple areas, including identity & access management, data protection, network & application protection, threat detection & continuous monitoring, and compliance & data privacy. Let’s get into the details:

Data Protection Services

AWS data protection services help businesses to secure their data, accounts, and workloads from unauthorized access. These services include security capabilities such as data encryption, user behavior analysis, key management, threat detection, and data monitoring. Key data protection tools offered by AWS are:

  • Amazon Macie

Amazon Macie is a data security and privacy service that leverages machine learning (ML) and pattern matching to identify and secure critical data in the AWS cloud.  The tool automates the process of data identification and significantly axes the expenses for securing the data.

Macie automatically comes with an inventory of Amazon S3 buckets, including unencrypted buckets, open-source buckets, and buckets shared with AWS accounts beyond those defined in AWS organizations. Then, Macie applies machine learning and pattern matching techniques to evaluate the buckets to identify sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), and notify the users.

Businesses can set up and manage Amazon Macie using the 30-day free trial. The trial features Amazon S3 bucket inventory and bucket-level security and access control assessment. However, data discovery is not included in the free trial.

  • AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is a secure and resilient tool that enables users to build cryptographic keys to encrypt or digitally sign the data and manage their use across AWS environments and applications. It leverages hardware security modules to secure the keys. Moreover, the KMS tool gleans deep insights into key usage and helps businesses gain a deep understanding of who accessed the encrypted data.

The best part of AWS KMS is that there are no upfront charges to use it. Users can just pay USD 1 per month to create and store any key. Moreover, keys created by AWS services on behalf of the users are free to store. Beyond the free tier, users are charged per request to use or manage their keys.

Identity and Access Management Services

AWS Identity and Access Management service enables businesses to securely manage the identities of users, including employees, partners, and customers, and grant the right access to the right resources at the right time. It facilitates flexible administration capabilities and fine-grained access controls over multi-account environments. Businesses can leverage the analytic tools to implement the principle of least privilege access, discover inactive permissions, and remove unnecessary access promptly. Here are the top identity tools offered by AWS:

  • AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM)

AWS identity and access management (IAM) tool enables cloud customers to apply and manage fine-grained access control to AWS services and resources. Businesses can define specific conditions under which users can gain access to a specific AWS service or resource. This service also allows you to deploy permissions guardrails and data perimeters. The IAM service is offered without any additional charge.

  • AWS Resource Access Manager

AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) is a service that allows organizations to securely share their resources across AWS accounts and also with IAM roles & users for supported resource types. Users can securely share a host or resource types, such as subnets, transit gateways, Amazon Route 53 Resolver rules, and AWS License Manager license configurations. Moreover, the AWS RAM eliminates the need to create duplicate resources in multi-account environments. Users can create a resource once and share it across multiple AWS accounts. This feature axes the operational overhead of managing multiple resources in every account. The icing on the cake is that the AWS RAM service is available at no additional expense.

Network and Application Protection Services

AWS Network & Application Protection service allows cloud customers to embed stringent security policies at every network control point across the organization. It also offers flexible security features that help users gain real-time traffic visibility, and implement robust filtering, monitoring, and logging to prevent any illicit resource access, potential vulnerabilities, performance degradation, and data theft. In addition, the service provides a central platform to manage firewall rules across all AWS accounts, aggregate security event reporting, and ensure policy compliance across the cloud. Here are the AWS tools for host-, network-, and application-level protection:

  • AWS Network Firewall

As a managed service, AWS Network Firewall allows businesses to implement network security controls across their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) with just a touch of their fingers. With this service, there’s no need to build and manage your own network security infrastructure as the service can scale automatically with your network traffic. It features a customizable rules engine that allows users to hammer out their own firewall rules according to their unique workloads. The network firewall supports thousands of web filtering rules that help to prevent traffic destined for known illegitimate URLs and domains.

  • AWS Shield

As a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service, AWS Shield helps businesses to secure their applications running on AWS from network and transport layer DDoS attacks. It also facilitates continuous network flow monitoring and inline mitigation against DDoS attacks that target your website or applications. AWS Shield is offered in two tiers, namely, AWS Shield Standard and AWS Shield Advanced.

All cloud customers can freely leverage AWS Shield Standard services to protect against the most common DDoS threats. AWS Shield Advanced, on the other hand, offers identification and prevention of large and sophisticated DDoS attacks and deep visibility into attacks, in addition to services offered by Standard.

  • AWS Web Application Firewall

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) aids cloud customers in securing their web applications from common web threats that disrupt website availability or drain excessive resources. It empowers businesses with absolute control over their application traffic by creating security rules to prevent bot traffic and common threats such as SQL injection. Users can also quickly implement AWS WAF using managed rules, a predefined set of rules offered by AWS. Moreover, one can also automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of security rules by using WAF’s full-featured API. The prime USP for AWS WAF is that it comes with pay as you go pricing model. The pricing depends on the number of rules the customers deploy and the web requests their application receives.

  • AWS Firewall Manager

AWS Firewall Manager service empowers AWS cloud users to centrally configure and control firewall rules across their accounts and application in AWS environs. With this Firewall Manager at their disposal, businesses can create and implement firewall rules and security policies across their infrastructure from a central administrator account. So, as soon as a new application is developed, the Firewall Manager automatically enforces security rules and policies around it and ensures compliance. Moreover, this service enables AWS users to easily dole out AWS WAF rules, build AWS Shield Advanced protection, and configure new Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) security groups.

Threat Detection & Continuous Monitoring Services

AWS offers intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring services to identify and prevent threats proactively across the cloud environment. Here are the key AWS security tools for threat detection:

  • Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is an intelligent threat detection tool that helps businesses to secure their AWS accounts and workloads by continuously monitoring for malicious activities, such as odd API calls and potentially unauthorized deployments. It uses machine learning, threat intelligence feeds, and anomaly detection to identify and prioritize potential threats.

Amazon GuardDuty is easy to deploy and cost-effective. It is available without any upfront costs, as there is no need for any security infrastructure, software, or threat intelligence feeds. Moreover, the service comes with a 30-day free trial for every new account. Users need to pay only for the events assessed by GuardDuty.

  • AWS Security Hub

AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management (CSPM) service.  It helps businesses automate security checks, centralize security alerts, and enable automated response and remediation actions upon detecting deviations. AWS customers can also continuously monitor their cloud environs by automating security checks on par with AWS best practices and industry standards. Users can enable AWS Security Hub simply from the Management Console and start aggregating and prioritizing findings. This service is available at no charge with a 30-day free trial.

  • Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is a simple, yet highly scalable, vulnerability management tool that offers automated and continual vulnerability monitoring services. It enables users to continually scan AWS workloads to discover software vulnerabilities and gaping holes in the network. The service also facilitates multi-account management to allow users to install and maintain Amazon Inspector across the AWS organization with little to no configuration requirements. This vulnerability management tool can be deployed with just a click and has a low operational overhead.

Compliance and Data Privacy

AWS compliance and data privacy service help users gain deep visibility into their compliance framework and ensure the standards are met using automated compliance checks. AWS supports a wide range of compliance certifications, including GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FIPS 140-2, FedRAMP, and NIST 800-171. This broad set of compliance offerings enables customers to meet compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe. The compliance and data privacy tools offered by AWS are:

  • AWS Artifact

AWS Artifact is a one-stop shop for all information related to the compliance standards specific to your industry. Users can gain direct access to AWS security and compliance reports and choose online agreements. Service Organization Control (SOC) reports and Payment Card Industry (PCI) reports are some of the reports available in AWS Artifact. Likewise, Business Associate Addendum (BAA) and the Nondisclosure Agreement (NDA) are the agreements offered by this service. AWS customers can review, apply, and manage their agreements with AWS to all their accounts within their organization using this Artifact. Users can access this service directly from the AWS Management Console.

  • AWS Audit Manager

With AWS Audit Manager, AWS customers can simplify the process of assessing risk and compliance with industry standards and regulations by continuously auditing their AWS usage. The tool automates evidence collection for auditing and significantly reduces manual efforts and enables businesses to scale their cloud audit capability as needed. The Audit Manager also helps in building audit-ready reports with much less human effort.

The predefined frameworks in the AWS Audit Manager help convert cloud evidence into auditor-friendly reports by mapping the AWS resources to the relevant regulations. The users can also customize a framework on par with their unique business needs. Upon selecting a framework, the Audit Manager initiates an assessment that automatically collects and organizes relevant evidence from the users’ AWS accounts and resources.

Incident Response Services

Security is the highest priority in cloud adoption. Whenever a deviation from the security standards does occur (such as a misconfiguration), businesses must be able to investigate and identify the root cause of the deviation, before it turns into a security issue. If in case, any security incident occurs, businesses must be able to respond and recover from that incident promptly and minimize business downtime. Taking heed of these security scenarios, AWS has introduced the below security tools to help AWS customers respond and react promptly:

  • Amazon Detective

Amazon Detective service enables AWS customers to seamlessly analyze and identify the root cause of any security deviation or suspicious activity. It automatically gleans log data from the customers’ AWS resources and leverages machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to deliver valuable insights. This valuable information helps conduct faster and more effective security investigations and determine the root cause of the issue with ease. Amazon Detective can easily process trillions of event data records easily and produce visualizations of the details to enable customers to discover the findings, take a deep dive into relevant historical activities, and quickly find the root cause.

Customers can easily deploy Amazon Detective from the AWS Console.

  • AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) empowers businesses to effectively recover on-premises and cloud-based applications during any unprecedented circumstances and significantly minimize downtime and data loss. The AWS customers need to set up AWS DRS on their source servers to start data replication. The replicated data is stored in a staging area subnet in the customer’s AWS account. The staging area utilizes affordable storage and minimal computing resources for data replication. This process minimizes data replication costs significantly.

With AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, businesses can recover their apps within minutes, at their most recent state or from the previous point in time. Moreover, businesses don’t require specialized skill sets, as the tool features a unified process to test, recover, and fail back a wide range of applications.

Other security tools offered by AWS are:

The Final Thoughts

With a broad range of AWS security services available in the market, it can be a herculean task to choose the right services that suffice the unique security needs of a business. The investments can easily go astray if the AWS customers fail to identify the unique set of security tools they require. This is where Continuum Innovations comes in.

As a leading partner of AWS, Continuum Innovations knows ins and outs of AWS security services and tools. Our AWS experts bring in their vast industry presence and specialized, state-of-art skillsets to help you choose the right tools to secure your workloads and applications in the AWS cloud. As a stitch in time saves nine, now is the right time to act. Let’s join forces, and make your cloud more resilient and secure.

Contact Us!