Nine Best Practices to Maximize Cybersecurity on the AWS Cloud

Cloud computing has enabled enterprises to deliver customer experience and accelerate business growth with scalability, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility. It has also ushered in optimal resource deployment, access to customer needs, , increased collaboration, data security, disaster recovery, and automated software updates. It has enabled businesses to deliver efficient business operations, improve productivity, and reduce capital expenditure while improving overall IT performance. Among the key players who lead the cloud computing market, Amazon Web Services (AWS) now offers wide variety of cloud services to support the digital journey and serves over a million organizations that seek simple-to-scale cloud solutions for their system demands.

As services move to cloud, this also presented security challenges to business. Risk associated with cloud also introduced complexities to stay ahead from the bad actors that are ready to disrupt the business. Securing a cloud is quite different from safeguarding an on-premises setup and has its challenges. Need for effective strategies is undoubtful. Actions against cyber threats must be planned early (not as a after thought process) with multiple security defense mechanisms enabling the cloud resources and business data..They also need to prepare for unpredictable zero-day attacks.

AWS takes maximum measures to protect its global web infrastructure and cloud-native apps secure. And also make number of security components available for the customers. , Users must also take advantage of security components to ensure data security, access management, client-side encryption, network segmentation, incident response, and compliance. AWS offers a industry benchmarked security components/principles to adopt for their services through a well architected framework. Enterprises need to optimize their threat intelligence and implement security solutions with a focus on:

• Practical understanding of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model
• Deep visibility into multiple cloud deployments
• Ensuring that cloud workloads meet applicable regulatory requirements
• Enforcing consistent security policies for non-integrated CSP environments.

As a proven AWS partner, YASH Technologies recommends to align with the well architected principles. We enourage to adopt few best practices to stay protected and deliver secured business services to your customers:

Control over administrator credentials: AWS users must monitor their admin accounts strictly and keep a robust set of permissions to avoid the risks of anomalies. For routine workflows, it is advisable to use only the necessary functions with restricted access rights and discourage excessive usage that can be dangerous if not handled responsibly. The administrators should have distinct account logins and encryption systems to avoid risks of malicious infiltration.

Categorizing identities and apply policy management: Identity entitlement management is a complex process. You can segregate identities into groups and roles with linked permissions to manage compute and human resources. Additionally, senior IT executives must have complete visibility into the roles and privileges of all users and their devices. Without such visibility, an identity may get more access than necessary, making the organization vulnerable to risks. A reliable 3^rd party cloud security provider’s support helps ensure such visibility.

Activating multifactor authentication (MFA) by default: This is critical for keeping AWS environments safe as it requires individuals to have physical devices and some personal knowledge to access protected information. MFA-based access controls can prevent risky intrusions by verifying valid identity and monitoring its usage to ensure it stays within the mandated security permissions and parameters.

Apply usage of one-time credentials: Access keys offer long-term access to cloud resources and may result in unauthorized personnel logging into a system. A better strategy is to enable logins via consoles with user/password combinations. Applying one-time passwords, verification codes, and other temporary credentials is a general best practice to protect data stored in AWS repositories.

Rotating access keys: Rotating access keys or tokens implies that the enterprise has to delete a user’s access key and create a new one every time it changes applications. It is an excellent way to minimize risks and prevent hackers from compromising cloud accounts. Since May 2022, AWS key management service automatically rotates managed keys in approximately 365 days.

Enforce Centralized IAM with CIEM: By centralizing its identity and access management, an organization gets a single point of control for all identities, making enforcing policies and governing access more straightforward. YASH Technologies helps customers leverage Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) to ensure that privileges are centrally administered and can be aligned to business requirements such as least privilege or least access. Our CIEM solution checks entitlements and enables continuous monitoring to ensure access policies stay in place.

Discovering and recording all identities: Senior cloud administrators can only secure and manage the accounts, identities, roles, and assets they can find. However, it is challenging to discover and document machine and human identities and their entitlement if scripts and automation processes are layered all along the toolchain. Some identities get embedded in runtimes or are hard-coded into executable files and are therefore not visible. To have visibility into what exactly automation tools execute and the privileges assigned to them, organizations can again use CIEM – it helps to discover and inventory all human and machine identities.

Mitigate hard-coded passwords and shared secrets through code reviews: Application development in AWS moves quickly, and to keep their process convenient, that involved teams often use hard-coded passwords and share accounts. Unfortunately, most of them also tend to leave behind such passwords and shared secrets in their final application versions or within the technology infrastructure – these are common mistakes made to keep automation working with stability. The complexity of this problem increases because it is challenging to trace or audit activities within the affected environment. The best practice to avoid such issues is continuously monitoring identities and managing the risks linked to critical systems and data. All potential paths for access to workloads, data, containers, and identities should be uncovered and categorized by privilege.

Going beyond AWS workload security: As more enterprises shift to the cloud and serverless and containerized deployments, the unique architectures of their cloud service providers (CSPs) require tailored security for workload protection. Introduce independent cloud security assessment to discover weaknesses that otherwise remain advantgaes to a bad actor., Implement custom measures to secure the data and identities associated with the specific services.

End-to-end cloud security services with YASH Technologies 

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, YASH offers organizations the expertise to rise above cyber threats and address their requirements while fueling business growth. We help enterprises boost identity and access management, risk detection management, infrastructure integrity, data protection, incident response, and compliance management for round-the-clock AWS cybersecurity.

To explore our range of services in this domain, please visit https://www.yash.com/coe/aws/ or reach out at aws_info@yash.com

• AWS
• AWS Cloud
• AWS Security
• Cybersecurity