Security in AWS

In today's digital landscape, security is paramount. Thankfully, AWS offers a whole host of security services designed to protect your infrastructure, data, and applications. This blog post takes a look into the security services available in AWS, with a particular focus on those that operate at an organisation level, ensuring comprehensive protection across all your AWS accounts.

Overview of Security Services within AWS

AWS provides a range of services that cater to different aspects of cloud security, from identity management to threat detection. Here's an overview of some key services:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): Manages access to AWS services and resources.
• AWS Key Management Service (KMS): Creates and controls encryption keys.
• Amazon GuardDuty: Provides intelligent threat detection.
• AWS Security Hub: Offers a comprehensive view of security alerts and compliance status.
• AWS Control Tower: Simplifies the setup and governance of a secure, multi-account AWS environment.

Organisation-Level Security Services

When managing multiple AWS accounts, maintaining security across all of them can be challenging. AWS offers several services that operate at the organisation level, providing centralised security management and monitoring.

AWS Organisations

AWS Organisations is a central governance service that helps you manage and control multiple AWS accounts. It allows you to:

• Consolidate Billing: Aggregate billing for multiple accounts.
• Centralised Management: Apply policies and manage permissions across accounts.
• Service Control Policies (SCPs): Enforce policies that restrict what services and actions users can access.

AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower simplifies the setup and governance of a secure, multi-account AWS environment. It provides:

• Automated Account Provisioning: Streamlined account creation and configuration.
• Guardrails: Predefined governance rules to enforce security and compliance.
• Centralised Dashboard: Unified view of your AWS environment's security and compliance status.

AWS Security Hub

AWS Security Hub offers a comprehensive view of your security alerts and compliance status across AWS accounts. Key features include:

• Aggregated Security Findings: Centralises findings from various AWS security services like GuardDuty, Inspector, and Macie.
• Compliance Checks: Continuously monitors your environment against security standards such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark.
• Automated Response: Integrates with AWS Lambda and AWS Systems Manager for automated remediation.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail provides comprehensive logging and monitoring of account activity across your AWS infrastructure. It enables:

• Audit and Compliance: Records API calls made on your account, helping with audit and compliance requirements.
• Security Analysis: Facilitates security analysis by providing detailed logs of user activity.
• Centralised Management: Allows you to consolidate logs from multiple accounts into a single S3 bucket.

AWS Config

AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. Features include:

• Configuration Management: Tracks changes to your resources and records their configurations.
• Compliance Auditing: Continuously evaluates your AWS environment for compliance with policies and best practices.
• Resource Inventory: Provides a detailed inventory of your AWS resources and their configurations.

Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behaviour. It offers:

• Intelligent Threat Detection: Uses machine learning to identify potential threats.
• Centralised Threat Detection: Aggregates findings from multiple accounts.
• Integration with AWS Security Hub: Centralises GuardDuty findings in Security Hub for unified visibility.

AWS Macie

AWS Macie is a data security and privacy service that uses machine learning to discover, classify, and protect sensitive data. Key features include:

• Data Discovery: Automatically discovers sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII).
• Data Classification: Classifies data based on content and context.
• Continuous Monitoring: Continuously monitors data access and usage for anomalies.