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Cyber Security

AWS Security Services and Compliance | The Complete Guide

Navdeep Singh Gill | 28 August 2024

AWS Security Services and Compliance | The Complete Guide
12:35
AWS Security Services and Compliance

Introducing AWS Security Services

AWS Security is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all the Amazon Web Services cloud services and the cloud itself. This infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and networks. Amazon Web Services makes it a priority to protect this network.

What are the benefits of Security Services?

  1. Keeps Data Safe: Infrastructure incorporates strong safeguards to help protect privacy. All data is processed in highly protected data centers.
  2. Meets Compliance Requirements: Manages dozens of compliance programs in its infrastructure. Organizations meet compliance effortlessly.
  3. Saves Operational Cost: Operational cost is reduced as organizations don't have to maintain on-premise facilities. 
  4. Scales Quickly: Security scales with the organization's usage of Amazon Web Services Cloud. The architecture is built to keep data secure, no matter the size of the enterprise.
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What are its Security and Compliance?

AWS Cloud Compliance enables you to understand the robust controls in to maintain security and data protection in the cloud. The related enablers are built on traditional programs by combining governance-focused, audit-friendly features with applicable compliance or audit standards. This helps clients to establish and operate in an environment of Amazon Web Services security control. The IT infrastructure that it provides to an organization is designed and managed in alignment with best security practices & a variety of IT security standards. A partial list of assurance programs Amazon Web Services complies with is as follows:
  • SOC 1/ISAE 3402, SOC 2, SOC 3
  • PCI DSS Level 1
  • FISMA, DIACAP, and FedRAMP
  • ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018

AWS Shared Security Responsibility Model 

It is essential to consider how security in the cloud is subtly different from security in the on-premise data centers before discussing the specifics of how its security works. Security obligations are exchanged with the organization and its cloud service provider as organizations transfer their operating systems and data to the cloud. In this case, It is responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure that supports the cloud. The organization is responsible for anything that you put into the cloud or connect to the cloud. This shared security responsibility model can reduce your operational burden in many ways and, in some cases, may even improve default security posture without additional action on your part.Shared Security Responsibility Model  Inspired by The Shared Responsibility Model - Amazon Web Services, we think that the amount of security configuration work you need to do depends on which services you choose and how sensitive your data is.

What are its security services?

Go through the detailed service-specific security below for a better understanding of AWS Security Compliance.

Computing Services

Amazon Web Services offers a range of cloud-based computing tools, providing a broad array of compute instances that can scale up and down dynamically to meet program or company needs.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security

It is a critical component in Amazon's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), providing resizable computing capacity using server instances in its data centers. 

Auto Scaling Security

Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to the conditions you define. The number of Amazon EC2 instances an organization uses changes automatically to reduce costs and still maintain performance. 

Networking Services

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Elastic Load Balancing

It is   used to manage traffic on the Amazon EC2 fleet to distribute traffic to instances across all available zones within a region.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Security

Amazon VPC enables organizations to create an isolated portion of the AWS cloud and launch Amazon EC2 instances with private (RFC 1918) addresses. 

Storage Services

Amazon Web Services provides low-cost data storage with high reliability and availability. It provides backup, archiving, and disaster recovery management services and block and object storage.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Security

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) allows organizations to upload and retrieve data from anywhere on the web at any time. It stores the data inside buckets as objects. An object may be a file of any kind: text file, image, video, etc.

Amazon S3 Glacier Security Like Amazon S3

The Amazon S3 Glacier provides low-cost, secure, and durable storage services. It is built for fast retrieval. Amazon S3 Glacier is intended to be used as an archival service for data that is not regularly accessed and for which multiple hours of retrieval time is acceptable.

AWS Storage Gateway Security

The Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway service connects your on-site software device to cloud-based storage to ensure seamless and secure integration between your IT environment and the storage infrastructure for it.

AWS Snowball Security 

It is a simple, secure method for physically transferring large amounts of data to Amazon S3, EBS, or Amazon S3 Glacier storage. Amazon Snowball service is typically used by organizations with over 100 GB of data and slow connection speeds that result in prolonged transfer rates over the Internet.

Database Services

Amazon Web Services provides developers and companies with a range of storage options – from managed relational and NoSQL database services to in-memory caching as a service and petabyte-scale data warehouse infrastructure.

Amazon DynamoDB Security

Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database infrastructure with smooth scalability, delivering fast and reliable performance. It helps you to unload the administrative workload of operating and scaling distributed databases to it. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Security

Amazon RDS allows you to create a relational database (DB) instance quickly and flexibly scale the associated compute resources and storage capacity to meet application demand. It manages the database instance by performing backups, handling failover, and maintaining the database software. It is available for MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL database engines.

Amazon Redshift Security

Amazon Redshift Security is a SQL data warehouse service of petabyte-scale that runs on highly optimized and managed AWS computing and storage resources. The service was architectured to scale up or down rapidly and improve query speeds for enormous datasets significantly.

Deployment and Management Services

Amazon Web Services offers a variety of tools to help with application deployment and management.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM allows many users to create and manage each of these users' permissions within the Account. A user is an identity with unique security credentials to access Amazon Web Services. 

Amazon CloudWatch Security

Amazon Cloudwatch is a web application, with Amazon EC2, which offers to monitor its cloud services. It provides visibility to customers regarding resource utilization, operational performance, and the pattern of overall demand.
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AWS Security Checklist

Ensure to follow the AWS Security Checklist below to enhance your security to the maximum level.

The Starting List

  1. Permit CloudTrail logging across all Amazon Web Services.
  2. Set on CloudTrail log file validation.
  3. Permit CloudTrail multi-region logging.
  4. Combine CloudTrail with CloudWatch.
  5. Permit access logging for CloudTrail S3 buckets.
  6. Permit access logging for Elastic Load Balancer (ELB).
  7. Then, Permit Redshift audit logging.
  8. And then Permit Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logging.
  9. Multifactor authentication (MFA) is required to delete CloudTrail buckets.
  10. Set on multifactor authentication for the "root" account.
  11. Set on multifactor authentication for IAM users.
  12. Permit IAM users for multi-mode access.
  13. Link IAM policies to groups or roles.
  14. Regularly rotate IAM access keys and standardize on the selected number of days.
  15. Set up a strict password policy.
  16. Set the password termination session to 90 days.
  17. Don't use expired SSL/TLS certificates.
  18. User HTTPS for CloudFront distributions.
  19. Limit access to the CloudTrail bucket.
  20. Encrypt the CloudTrail log files at rest.
  21. Encrypt the Elastic Block Store (EBS) database.
  22. Provision access to resources using IAM roles.
  23. Avoid using root user accounts.

The Ending List

  1. SSL secure ciphers must be applied while connecting between the client and ELB.
  2. SSL secure versions must be used while connecting between ELB and the Client.
  3. Use a standard naming (tagging) convention for EC2.
  4. Encrypt Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS).
  5. Access keys should not be used with root accounts.
  6. Use secure CloudFront SSL versions.
  7. Permit the require_ssl parameter in all Redshift clusters.
  8. Periodically rotate SSH keys.
  9. Minimize the number of discrete security groups.
  10. Reduce the number of IAM groups.
  11. Terminate available access keys.
  12. Disable access for unused or inactive IAM users.
  13. Remove unused IAM access keys.
  14. Delete unused SSH Public Keys.
  15. Limit access to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), EC2 security groups, RDS instances, Redshift clusters, and Outbound access.
  16. Disallow unrestricted ingress access on different ports.
  17. Limit access to well-known ports such as CIFS, FTP, ICMP, SMTP, SSH, and Remote desktop.
  18. Involve IT security throughout the development process.
  19. Grant as limited privileges as possible for application users.
  20. Encrypt susceptible data such as personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI).

AWS-responsible-for-the-security
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Conclusion

AWS Security Services are a must when it comes to catering Security for enterprises employing it. We also provide Azure Security Services and GCP security solutions.