Defining Cloud Security Requirements: AWS Security Best Practices

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers flexible and scalable computing infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of similar in-house infrastructure. Such cloud-based infrastructure is a huge boon for businesses, especially SMBs because of the cost savings and speed of deployment. But while businesses are quick at adopting the cloud, cloud security often gets neglected. Consequently, cloud security incidents and data breaches are occurring more often.

To help you create a secure cloud environment, we are sharing a series of blog posts focused on cloud-specific security measures and best practices. This blog post talks about defining your cloud security requirements and cloud security strategy, which constitute the second step in our AWS security best practices series.

Define Your Cloud Security Requirements

In the first edition of our series, we talked about the shared responsibility model of AWS and how you can define and categorize your cloud assets to better secure them. If you have followed it, you should now know what are your security responsibilities as a customer of AWS and have ready an asset classification that includes the asset name, type, owner, its financial impact, and dependencies.

The asset matrix thus developed will be instrumental in defining our cloud security requirements and designing systems that meet the defined security and compliance requirements. Here are steps that will help you define the cloud security requirements for your organization:

1. Identify The Threats

To have effective security systems, you need to know what you are protecting against. And this is exactly what this step is all about. As a security-conscious business owner, you may already have a security strategy in place for your organization and must have identified relevant security threats to your organization.security threats

However, it is important to understand that cloud threats differ from traditional security threats in many ways. Adoption of the cloud removes many of the traditional network boundaries and network security barriers, opening up more ways for attackers to access and control internal systems.

Here are some common types of threats to your cloud infrastructure:

• Insider Threats

• Insecure Interfaces and APIs

• Denial-of-Service Attacks

• Hijacking of Accounts

• Malware Infection

• Misconfiguration

2. Prioritize By Using A Threat Model

Once you have identified the threats, it is very likely that you will notice a number of vulnerabilities and security gaps in your systems. This brings the question of how do you decide which vulnerability to fix first.

Threat modeling gives you an understanding of how attacks work and allows you to prioritize vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited. The combined knowledge of your system vulnerabilities and the strategies of attackers enables you to make informed decisions, focusing on select vulnerabilities that attackers need to breach the system.

Threat modeling includes the following basic steps:

1. Identify system vulnerabilities and security gaps.

2. Identify attack paths against your assets taking into consideration existing security measures and safeguards.

3. Identify realistic attacks that can exploit existing vulnerabilities and security gaps on the identified paths.

4. Prioritize vulnerabilities based on impact and criticality.

3. Include Compliance Requirements

As we already mentioned in the previous blog in this series, the security of your cloud environment is a responsibility shared with the cloud service provider. In the same way, compliance is also a shared responsibility. Identifying misuse, enforcing compliance and governance policies are your responsibility. If your compliance auditor determines that your cloud environment isn’t compliant with standards such as System and Organizational Control 2 (SOC 2), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) your organization could lose the ability to operate.

The traditional approach to compliance involves the use of checklists to ensure that standards and governance frameworks are adhered to and corresponding controls and settings are implemented. However, since the cloud is a highly dynamic environment, such a static process is not very effective in managing compliance requirements.

Therefore, compliance in the cloud requires more sophisticated processes, continuous monitoring, automation, and rigorous controls and settings. You will require continuous audit tools with real-time monitoring, identification, and analysis. Additionally, to satisfy the audits, you should also be able to present historical data of adherence to standards and defined procedures.

4. Evaluate And Select Security Controls

After identifying and prioritizing potential vulnerabilities and security gaps, the next step is to fill those gaps. Here are a few examples of threats and mitigating controls:

• Insider Threat

  • Use multifactor authentication (MFA) with your cloud services

  • Limit domain access to authorized users.

  • Implement identity and access management

  • Conduct regular access audits.

• Malware Infection

  • Implement a zero-trust security model.

  • Use network segmentation.

  • Implement intrusion detection and prevention system

Different threats and vulnerabilities will call for different security controls. You can use any combination of security controls as long as they meet your security and compliance requirements.

Define Your Cloud Security Strategy

One of the very first steps towards cloud security is the definition of a cloud security strategy. Building a cloud security strategy may seem a daunting task but if you have followed this blog post, you are well on your way to doing it. The steps outlined above including identifying threats, prioritizing fixes, establishing compliance requirements, and selecting security controls, all contribute towards building your security strategy.

For most small and medium-sized businesses, the process outlined above will be sufficient. However, if your organization would like a more standardized approach, you can opt for the ISO 27001 or the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which is more tailored to the cloud. These standard frameworks define the minimum controls and provide guidelines that can act as a pre-written strategy. Whichever approach you choose, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you need to have clarity of what the end result should look like.

Conclusion

Cloud services offer unmatched flexibility and scalability, giving you the ability to quickly enroll new users and generate instances as needed. However, the very features that make the cloud accessible also make them difficult to secure. Although cloud services providers take security very seriously, the cloud is not inherently secure as many may believe.

Risks of unauthorized data transfers, service disruptions, and associated reputational damage are amplified for businesses that rely on the cloud. Therefore, organizations need to rethink their traditional security strategies to mitigate the security risks of the cloud. With the right tools and security controls in place, businesses can enjoy the benefits of the cloud without having to overly worry about the risks. And one of the first steps towards securing your cloud infrastructure is to define your Cloud Security Strategy.

Do you need help securing your cloud environment? Does your cloud environment meet security standards and compliance requirements? Reach out to us by clicking the button below to learn how we can help you secure your cloud.