Welcome to our blog! Today, we’re going to delve into the world of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its security services. AWS provides a robust set of services designed to help protect your data, monitor security checks, manage access control, and ensure compliance. Let’s break down some of these services.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
AWS IAM is a cornerstone of AWS security, providing the authorization and authentication framework used across AWS services. It allows you to create and manage AWS users, groups, roles, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources. For example, you can create a user with full access to AWS S3 but restricted access to EC2 instances. This granular control helps ensure that your AWS resources are accessed securely.
AWS Shield
AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service. It comes in two tiers - AWS Shield Standard and AWS Shield Advanced. The standard tier is available to all AWS customers at no extra cost and provides automatic DDoS detection and mitigation to protect your applications from common, most frequently observed DDoS attacks. The advanced tier offers cost protection, DDoS cost protection, risk management reports, and 24/7 DDoS response team (DRT) access.
AWS Security Hub
AWS Security Hub is a security and compliance service that provides a comprehensive view of the high-priority security alerts and your overall security and compliance status. It aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes your security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Macie, and from AWS Partner solutions. A key feature of AWS Security Hub is its automated security checks. These checks are based on the AWS best practices and industry standards, such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark.
AWS Inspector
AWS Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. AWS Inspector assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices, including impacted networks, instances, OS, and installed applications. After performing an assessment, AWS Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity.
AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
AWS KMS is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the cryptographic keys used to encrypt your data. AWS KMS is integrated with other AWS services making it easier to encrypt data you store in these services and control access to the keys that decrypt it.
AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. It allows you to log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. AWS CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services.
AWS Guard Duty
AWS Guard Duty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts and workloads. It identifies unusual or unauthorized activity, like crypto-currency mining or infrastructure deployments in a region that has never been used. Powered by machine learning, GuardDuty analyzes billions of events in pursuit of trends, patterns, and anomalies that are almost impossible to detect with the human eye.
AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over how traffic reaches your applications by enabling you to create security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).
- AWS Macie
AWS Macie is a fully managed data privacy and security service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and protect your sensitive data in AWS. Macie automates the process of discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager protects access to your applications, services, and IT resources. This service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.
Stay tuned for our next blog, where we will discuss how to effectively use these services to build a robust security infrastructure for your AWS environment. Remember, security is a shared responsibility, and AWS provides you with the tools necessary to secure your environment. Happy reading!