To stay competitive in today’s business landscape, businesses need to be nimble and ready to face the ever-changing business requirements. The urge to take the plunge in moving your on-premise applications to the cloud makes your business more customer-friendly. With a multitude of cloud providers in the fore, organizations turn to AWS more often than not.

AWS is one of the leading cloud providers that businesses leverage to rapidly deploy and scale technology to meet their growing IT demands and infrastructure. It’s an efficient and cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes and offers faster ROI.

With more and more organizations leveraging AWS, and with cloud infrastructures getting more complex with each passing day, the time is ripe for businesses to develop comprehensive, proactive security strategies that improve security from day 1 of your cloud journey and evolve with the developing IT infrastructure.

In order to protect your AWS cloud from security breaches and threats, you must update your AWS cloud security policies. In this blog, we look at the top 10 AWS best security practices that every business must follow.

10 AWS Best Security Practices

1. Know all about your AWS Framework

While AWS doesn’t take responsibility for security in your cloud, they do help you with managing your AWS workloads.

In case you’ve just embarked on your cloud journey, the first thing you must do is get familiar with the AWS framework. This will give you an ab-initio on all the cloud services available on AWS. The security pillar in the framework gives you an idea about the wide range of AWS best security practices to keep you away from malwares and threats.

2. Chalk out a Cybersecurity Strategy

Whenever you migrate to the cloud, it’s imperative to have a cloud security strategy in place. If this is your first cloud migration initiative, traditional security solutions wouldn’t suffice to safeguard your cloud applications. Businesses must develop a real-time cloud security strategy that offers long-time protection to your AWS cloud.

As far as AWS is concerned, chalking out a clear-cut cloud security strategy will help you protected in the world of CI/CD. Businesses also need to ensure the entire IT team is briefed on the AWS cloud security strategy and trained accordingly. This will help you instill end-to-end cloud security in your workflow and maintain compliance.

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3. Deploy Cloud Security Controls

As mentioned earlier, the business is wholly responsible for security and not AWS. The onus is on the business to instill security measures to ensure customer and company data is prevented from cyberattacks. Listed below are some cloud security controls and guidelines that will help you prevent cyberattacks:

  • Clearly-defined user roles: Never grant users extensive privileges beyond the requirements.
  • Conduct privilege audits: Businesses must revoke user privileges when they no longer need them. Schedule privilege audits to revisit your employees’ privileges and compare them with the ongoing projects.
  • Implement a strong password policy: When you set a password, it should not only be strong (comprising alphabets, numerals, and special characters) but also have an expiration date. This allows users to change passwords on a weekly or a monthly basis.
  • Use MFA and time-outs: Multi-factor authentications and session time-outs also make your AWS cloud slightly more secure and avoid third parties to login to your cloud.

4. Make your AWS Security Policies Accessible

Document your security policies and guidelines on an internal drive and share it with the entire IT team to make them accessible. Whenever there is an update on the security policies, make sure the document is updated as well.

5. Always Use Encryption

Encryptions are not only required for sensitive data for regulatory compliance, but also adds another layer to your AWS cloud security. In an ideal world, you must encrypt all your data – the data stored in transit and data in S3.

AWS comes with a native encryption feature that encrypts data stored in S3. Businesses can also leverage client-side encryption to ensure your AWS cloud is more secure than ever. AWS also offers a Key Management Service (KMS) that gives you a holistic control over your encryption keys.

6. Backup Your Cloud Data

In case of a breach, you may need to restore your data. To avoid this, backup your data regularly with AWS Backup to automate backups on a frequent basis and also consider MFA delete. More authentication methods, more secure is your cloud.

7. Keep your AWS Systems up to date

An outdated cloud infrastructure is quite vulnerable to security breaches. Therefore, businesses are advised to keep their AWS cloud servers patched at all times including the ones that aren’t publicly accessible. You are allowed to use third party tools to patch up your servers.

8. Create a Prevention and Response Strategy

Although your AWS cloud maybe end-to-end secured, you must also realize that you will be attacked at some point. Most cybersecurity strategies are focused on preventing malware threats. While you’re at it, it’s also inevitable that the threat landscape is constantly evolving and attackers are always finding new ways to breach your security walls.

In the event of a successful attack, you must be equipped well enough to respond faster. The quicker you identify where and why the breach occurred, and decipher your security vulnerabilities, you can solve the problem before it gets worse.

9. Adopt a Cloud-Native Security Solution

As mentioned earlier, traditional security solutions don’t work in today’s business landscape. The time is ripe to trust your AWS cloud security with a native cloud solution that:

  • Offers extensive security that supports safe and continuous delivery
  • Protects your AWS workloads against malicious threats
  • Provides greater visibility into your cloud infrastructure

10. Enable CloudTrail in all AWS regions

You can track all the activities running in your AWS resources by leveraging AWS CloudTrail. Even if you have a vague idea on how to use CloudTrail, using it now can help AWS Support and your AWS solution architects later in case they need to troubleshoot a security issue.

We hope these 10 AWS best security practices will help you stay afloat amidst the ever-evolving cloud infrastructure, but it’s also imperative to adopt a cloud-native approach to protect your AWS cloud against security threats and attacks.

Request a demo with us today as we help you embark on a secure cloud journey.

 

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