By Sujay Maheshwari, Co-founder and CEO, Cloudanix —

The Different Types of Protection your Application Needs If Hosted in AWS

AWS Security Best Practices

AWS or Amazon Web Services cloud security is a crucial subject in today’s cybersecurity environment. More businesses are adopting cloud services and even shifting to AWS.

Given the current landscape situation, there is no doubt that AWS is offering the best security feature to the users to secure their cloud infrastructure completely.

Some of the AWS security best practices are

Protect Data in Transit

Transferring data over the public, Wi-Fi can leave your business the most valuable asset vulnerable. Revisit how your website, method, and materials of data transfer are secured. Use a private connection, mandate that remote workers use a Virtual Private Network, and make it a policy that workers cannot connect from public places like the café.

The method you are using to transfer files is also a part of the AWS security best practices. HTTP traffic is unprotected by default, and your business should always use TLS or SSL protection as the best industry-standard practices.

Users can also try to manage various services from AWS with AWS APIs and Management Console. Use the console for the TLS or SSL protection where traffic is encrypted and data integrity is authenticated. As Amazon Web Security describes, once the client browser authenticates the identity with the help of an X.109 certificate, a TLS or SSL network connection is established, and all the HTTP traffic is now protected.

Use EBS encryption

EBS encryption from AWS offers a simple encryption solution that does not require you to build, secure, and maintain your crucial management infrastructure for your EBS resources.

The end-to-end encryption occurs on the servers hosting the Elastic Compute 2 instances. It ensures the security of both data-in-rest and data-in-transit and its attached EBS storage. With the help of Amazon EBS encryption, you can encrypt both the data volumes and boot of an EC2 instance.

Use roles for Amazon EC2

With the help of the latest advanced technology such as the IAM, it can help enterprises eliminate the risks of security compromises.

With the rules and regulations defined, users with lower access levels can conduct tasks in the AWS EC2 cloud, without the need to grant an extreme level of access.

This approach allows specific access to the AWS resources and services, thus reducing the possible attack surface area available to bad actors.

Watch world-readable and listable Amazon S3 bucket policies

Although IAM Policies are built to offer security, enterprises should take care so that their platforms’ stability remains intact for a longer period.

As companies even grow, they sometimes add the proper access control measures to their networks to keep up with the increasing demands placed on them.

As their network connection expands, they often lay newer platforms on top of the older systems, making it tough to keep a particular track of who is allowed to access their network.

To avoid the incidents that result from the multiple products that are being used simultaneously, it is even recommended to follow the stick with one product.

When an enterprise takes some time to select and then carefully maintain a system, security will surely act as it is expected to.

MFA Everywhere

Highly sensitive actions may require additional user validation; the best practice is to use Multi-Factor Authentication everywhere. Even with the appropriate role, users need to make sure that their identities with out-of-band factor-like push notifications to a pre-enrolled mobile device before specific actions can be performed. This can even significantly increase the confidence in preventing attackers, identity assurance using the compromised credentials common in cyberattacks. Implement MFA for the AWS service management at the time of login and privilege elevation for the AWS EC2 instances, checking out vaulted passwords, and accessing organizations’ apps.

CloudWatch and Alerting

Using a CloudTrail setup is great for monitoring, but if you need to have access control over alerting and self-healing, then use the CloudWatch. AWS CloudWatch provides immediate logging of events.

You can also set up the CloudTrail within a CloudWatch log group to create a proper log stream. Having a cloud trail event in the CloudWatch also adds some of the powerful features. You can even set up the metric filters to enable the CloudWatch alarm for suspicious activities.

S3 Block Public Access

AWS has even taken steps to automate the proper functionality to block the public access of a bucket. Previously a combination of Lambda, CloudWatch, CloudTrail was used.

There are also some instances where the developers will accidentally make the bucket to the public. To avoid accidental access to making the object public, these features come in handy.

The new block public access setting will help to prevent anyone from making the bucket to be public. You can even enable this setting in the Amazon Web Services console. You can also apply this setting to the account level.

ELB Listener Security Audit

If a load balancer has no listener who uses a secure HTTPS or SSL protocol, it is a threat to your data. Configure one or more secure listeners for your load balancer. You should always make sure to create SSL or HTTP listeners for publicly interfaced ELBs.

How Can Cloudanix Help?

  • At Cloudanix.com, we have simple to use tools to secure, monitor, baseline, and collaborate your AWS cloud, and don’t worry about Cloud Security Myths. Any misconfiguration or suspected behavior gets alerted in real-time for your team members to respond to. We have a generous Free plan and you can always explore our other plans via 2 weeks of a free trial. Give our free trial a spin now!


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