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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Securing Operational Technology (OT) Assets with Dragos on AWS

Reduce attack surface and vulnerabilities with a cybersecurity solution to protect your critical infrastructure

Overview

This Guidance demonstrates how to monitor the connectivity between operational technology (OT), IT, or external networks to ensure the security and integrity of critical industrial systems. It provides centralized monitoring and threat management for connected assets, enabling you to identify and prioritize risks to your OT environment with a holistic view of your assets and threat detection capabilities. This Guidance also supports auditing and compliance regulations, with its comprehensive monitoring and reporting capabilities. It generates detailed reports on asset inventory, vulnerabilities, security events, and timeline-based auditing of network communications, reducing your security risk while helping you meet compliance requirements.

How it works

This architecture diagram shows how to use the cybersecurity platform Dragos to secure operational technology (OT) assets at various manufacturing sites.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

Amazon CloudWatch is a service that allows you to optimize your operations through monitoring, logging, setting alarms, and viewing dashboards of Amazon EKS environments. CloudWatch monitors bandwidth utilization, performance, and the traffic parameters to the Dragos platform. Visualizing and analyzing these components using CloudWatch helps you to identify performance bottlenecks and to troubleshoot requests.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) offers centralized control over the cryptographic keys used to protect your data. GuardDuty provides visibility and remediation for detailed security findings. AWS Config and CloudWatch help you keep track of configuration changes and the activity within your accounts. Security Hub helps you keep track of the holistic security of the environment.

These services work collaboratively to provide a secure footprint for this Guidance. AWS Config, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and CloudWatch actively lock down the environment while GuardDuty and Security Hub help you maintain visibility and updates.

Read the Security whitepaper 

Amazon EKS provides a production-grade Kubernetes control plane designed to be highly-available and fault-tolerant. It runs the Kubernetes control plane across three Availability Zones in an AWS Region, and automatically manages the availability and scalability of Kubernetes API servers and Kubernetes clusters. Amazon EKS automatically scales control plane instances based on load; it also detects and replaces unhealthy control plane instances and automatically patches the control plane.

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Amazon EKS allows for optimizing container, resource management, and scalability management to drive performance efficiency for end users. It uses purpose-built storage services, such as Amazon S3, that reduces latency, increases throughput, and is highly scalable. This Guidance uses these services to scale effectively and to offload the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure management.

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This Guidance uses a combination of AWS Cost Explorer and the right-sizing of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to optimize the costs for Amazon EKS. Cost Explorer uses the tags of Amazon EC2 instances that are part of a managed node group and activated in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. Cost Explorer helps you analyze your AWS bill with an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

Amazon EC2 autoscaling enables you to add or remove nodes or pods as your workload changes; this autoscaling feature adjusts the cluster size so that the workload can run as efficiently as possible, thereby ensuring optimal resource use. It also allows for scheduled or dynamic scaling policies based on metrics, such as average CPU utilization or average network in or out. When used in conjunction with Cost Explorer, the Guidance receives opportunities to reduce cost and improve resource efficiency by downsizing instances where possible.

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Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.