A guide to cloud security tools for AWS
How to choose the right tool for the job to protect your cloud applications from modern security threats
Endpoint and user security
Endpoint and user security integrates device protection with comprehensive identity management across cloud environments. This capability secures various entry points while managing identities ranging from internal users to service workloads, following least-privilege principles. The framework must balance automated protection and policy enforcement while maintaining user experience.
Endpoint security
Open allHuman errors and social engineering remain perhaps the largest attack surface in most of today’s organizations, and one that presents unique challenges in protecting. Building a security layer that enforces protection to the human vector of attacks requires a complex and balanced mix of automation, policy and continuous scanning, all while ensuring that users continue to experience high-performance and usability.
Zero-day vulnerabilities are very difficult to detect and defend against using traditional security measures and require advanced threat intelligence mechanisms deployed to be able to detect and respond quickly before they can be exploited.
User identity and patch management are also key concerns to consider when protecting endpoints from malicious actors.
Key tools for the job
Identity and access management (IAM)
Open allCentrally managing all the different types of entities that may access different services and interfaces of your systems is a complex task, particularly as architecture becomes decentralized and service-oriented and as users, both internal and external, may get their identity from third-party identity providers.
Each different identity type will surface unique requirements to credential rotation and access policies. Managing these requirements at scale is usually a complex task.
Providing identities to non-interactive entities such as workloads and services requires efficient means of handling them across environments.
Key tools for the job
Traffic and application protection
East-west traffic filtering
Open allWith distributed services and horizontal scalability, traditional firewalling with rules based on ports and source IP ranges become obsolete, and new patterns towards building rules and policies for controlling traffic must be adopted.
Strategies such as Zero Trust create an even further separation between cloud-native security best practices and traditional security patterns. Zero Trust implies that nothing should be implicitly trusted regardless of its running location and relies on authentication and workload identity as the primary way in which traffic is permitted.
Mutual TLS (Transport Layer Security), known as mTLS, has surfaced as one of the most efficient and secure ways to apply Zero-Trust security in cloud environments, providing a common and proven framework to mutually authenticate using battle-proven encryption protocols. The challenge here becomes effectively managing and assigning identities through certificates to workloads that are dynamically scaled and that can be moved around regions, clusters, or networks.
Key tools for the job
North-south traffic filtering
Open allEgress security in cloud environments presents a significant challenge for organizations managing North-South traffic. The ephemeral and dynamic nature of cloud resources makes it difficult to maintain consistent control over outbound connections.
Organizations must implement sophisticated egress filtering mechanisms that can adapt to rapidly changing cloud workloads, prevent data exfiltration, and block communication between private resources and malicious servers.
Security teams require a solution that can simplify the management of cloud network security, eliminating the need to deploy and maintain firewall software infrastructure. This would allow them to concentrate their efforts on defining and enforcing effective security policies to protect against external threats, while offloading the underlying infrastructure management responsibilities.
Key tools for the job
“Man in the middle” attacks
Open allDetecting a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack is very complex, as there is usually no direct attack to your application or infrastructure, which means it must be identified externally or discovered through indirect analysis of your application traffic or usage patterns.
This type of attack targets systems that are managed and operated by other parties and to which you have no direct way to analyze or protect, which makes defending against MITM attacks particularly difficult.
Once an attack is ongoing, a corresponding range of potential application-side vulnerabilities may be exploited leveraging the data or intelligence acquired by the attacker from the first stage of the exploit. Identifying unusual user behavior and/or limiting the surface of the attack through internal security mechanisms is also an angle that can’t be overlooked.
Key tools for the job
Web application security
Open allThere’s huge diversity to the types and scale of attacks that web-based applications are exposed to. Everything from scraping and defacement to massive scale distributed denial of service (DoS) attacks to exploiting vulnerabilities for data theft or unauthorized access.
Today, web applications are usually built on top of many different microservices, each exposing its own attack surface.
Optimizing security centrally in your architecture to protect all services from the wide range of potential services becomes a key strategy to ensure security and reliability.
Key tools for the job
Incident prevention, management and response
This capability focuses on managing security across complex cloud-native environments where data sources and compliance requirements continue to grow. It emphasizes the need for efficient platforms that enable central observation, identification, and reaction to threats while managing security incidents and events effectively across global-scale operations.
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Backup-and-disaster recovery
Open allGetting data backed up is only half of the job; making sure that data can be restored and moved around as needed in the case of a disaster is just as important. Having the necessary cloud security tools to backup, validate, and restore that with flexibility are key concerns to satisfy in a backup-and-disaster recovery scenario.
Storing and moving data around can be costly, which means ensuring you are optimally using different storage tiers and reducing the total volume of data transferred at any given time is critical to keeping costs under control without negatively impacting the reliability your backup-and-recovery solution offers.
Key tools for the job
Virus protection
Open allViruses leverage many ways to spread themselves and can serve many purposes, from acting as Trojan horses to acting as ransomware, and may be dormant in storage for long periods of time before executing malicious code.
Scanning for viruses, depending on the volume of data that must be scanned, can be a slow activity that negatively impacts the performance of services or applications that rely on the data being scanned.
Identifying virus signatures requires continuous updating of virus databases and ongoing rescanning of data to ensure newly discovered viruses are guarded against.
Key tools for the job
Data security
Securing data would likely merit a selection tool of its own (and we’ll likely release one sooner than later, so keep an eye out), but for all practical reasons we’ll focus in this guide on two specific cloud security tool categories that are cornerstones to data security and system reliability.
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Security information and event management
Open allIntegration and configuration cloud Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools is usually a complex task that requires integrating many different data sources and workflows. Identifying relevant data sources, understanding the regulatory landscape, and fine-tuning all these attributes to ensure alerts and correlations are effectively configured requires time, attention to detail, and a lot of cross-functional collaboration.
Having a view into the potential scale of the data and events that will flow through the platform is also critical to avoid scalability problems as the tools are rolled out.
Key tools for the job
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