What is Cloud Infrastructure Security?

Cloud infrastructure security refers to the technologies, controls, and policies designed to enhance the security posture of the underlying cloud infrastructure. Strong cloud infrastructure security helps protect against threats such as DDoS events, data loss, and misconfigurations that could lead to unexpected security events. Cloud infrastructure security is a core component of cloud security.

How does the shared responsibility model relate to cloud infrastructure security?

The shared responsibility model is a system that determines who is responsible for specific cybersecurity measures between a cloud provider and you. Responsibilities can either fall to you, the cloud provider, or be a shared responsibility between both parties.

Here are the main responsibilities of each party in the shared responsibility model.

Cloud provider responsibilities

A cloud provider is responsible for protecting the physical infrastructure that runs their cloud services. Hardware, software, networking, and any facilities attached to the services are the responsibility of the cloud provider.

Your responsibilities

Your responsibilities in the shared responsibility model are determined by the cloud services that you select. Added together, these services determine the amount of configuration work you must perform as part of your security responsibilities. You are responsible for tasks such as managing your data, including encryption options, classifying your assets, and using Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools to apply the appropriate permissions.

Shared responsibilities

Some controls apply to both the provider’s infrastructure layer and customer layers, but in separate contexts or perspectives. Where responsibility is shared, the cloud provider applies the requirements for the infrastructure, and the customer provides a controls implementation within their use of the cloud services. Examples of this include configuration management, awareness and training.

What are the benefits of cloud infrastructure security?

Cloud infrastructure underpins all cloud services, making its security vital to all workloads in the cloud.

Here are several reasons why cloud infrastructure security is important for businesses.

Help prevent unauthorized access in cloud environments

Threat actors target cloud environments due to the vast volumes of data they contain. Misconfigurations, weak controls, or underlying vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure can introduce entry points for unauthorized third-party groups. Cloud infrastructure security measures should identify and control these points of entry, helping to keep your company's data safe and promoting data confidentiality.

Reduce disruptions to business continuity

Specific cyber threats, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) events, aim to reduce an organization’s ability to function as expected. Cloud infrastructure security measures, such as network segmentation, help to proactively defend against internal and external threats and help your business operations maintain high uptime.

Maintain trust

When an organization is involved in a cybersecurity event, particularly one related to customer data stored in the cloud, it can lead to reputational damage. Cloud infrastructure security better protects the virtualized services that run in the cloud, helping to make sure that sensitive company data remains private.

What are the key components of cloud infrastructure security?

Cloud infrastructure security solutions are usually cloud-native themselves.

Here are the key components of cloud infrastructure security.

Identity and access management

Organizations host sensitive data and information in the cloud and help make sure that authorized users can access these cloud resources. Identity and access management (IAM) defines which user roles can interact with or locate data. Alongside permission systems, IAM can verify the ownership of cloud accounts with multi-factor authentication, helping keep out unauthorized users.

Logging and telemetry

Logging and telemetry services aim to document specified actions and events in a cloud system. By carefully logging access events, movement of information, and cybersecurity actions, organizations achieve further visibility into their cloud infrastructure. Operational telemetry emitted by critical systems can create a trail of information, often used in audits.

Analytics

Analytics solutions can use operational telemetry and existing log data to determine inconsistencies, anomalies, or unexpected events that need further investigation. Analytics systems such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) aggregate data points to alert on and trace potential security events and help make sure that cloud infrastructure security monitoring systems are functioning as expected.

Network and device security

Employees access your cloud environment and the cloud resources stored within it from a wide variety of locations and devices. To fortify this expansive surface against potential threats, you can deploy a range of solutions. These solutions include network and device security to control inbound and outbound traffic, filter out malicious traffic, and workload isolation to help make sure that networks are compartmentalized.

Data encryption

Data security is the general process of making sure that all data, both in transit and at rest, is guarded against unauthorized access. Cloud infrastructure security can use data classification policies to tag data based on its sensitivity and apply various security practices to safeguard data. You can encrypt data both at rest and in transit to help make sure that only authorized parties can access sensitive data. Data security also involves developing and implementing data loss prevention strategies to enhance information security.

What are some cloud infrastructure security best practices?

Here are some of the best practices to enhance your cloud security strategy and help safeguard your underlying cloud computing infrastructure.

Create network layers

Creating network layers involves organizing your workload components into logical groups based on their function and sensitivity, such as internet-facing web servers or backend databases. By placing these components into separate subnets, you help establish clear boundaries and create opportunities to help control how traffic flows between them.

This layered approach supports a defense-in-depth strategy, where each layer acts as a security checkpoint. For example, only resources in the outermost layer should be exposed to the internet, whereas more sensitive systems, such as databases, remain isolated and accessible only through internal networks.

Virtual private clouds and private cloud infrastructure help create logically isolated networks and infrastructure in the cloud. Creating consistent security policies that define cloud networks and use helps promote a secure cloud environment.

Control traffic flow

Controlling traffic flow can involve segmenting your environment to allow only the necessary communication between workloads, users, and external systems. This traffic control includes managing both traffic between your network and the internet (north-south traffic) and between your network and the internet (east-west traffic).

A common mistake is relying solely on perimeter defenses or assuming trust within network layers. Instead, best practices emphasize a least privilege approach, where you grant access on a point-to-point basis, between users and cloud assets, including cloud servers. Controlling both inbound and outbound traffic this way helps limit the impact of unauthorized access and improves detection and response times during security events.

Implement inspection-based protection

Implementing inspection-based protection means examining traffic as it moves between network layers at a granular level. For example, analyzing the actual content, metadata, and behavior of data in transit. Inspection-based protection allows you to detect anomalies or potential unauthorized access based on real-time threat intelligence. You can create rules based on application context, user identity, or known threats, and become more stringent near sensitive workloads.

Automate network protection

Automating network protection using DevOps practices such as infrastructure as code (IaC) and CI/CD pipelines helps organizations deploy more secure, consistent, and repeatable network configurations. In the event of a change, automated pipelines initiate testing and deployment workflows. Changes are first deployed to a staging environment for validation, where you can test that they work as intended before going live.

AWS Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework offers a set of best practices and cloud security design practices to help protect AWS workloads. The security pillar of this framework offers prescriptive guidance on how to better protect your systems, data, and information with strong, layered cloud security and proactive safeguards.

By reviewing the Well-Architected guidelines frequently, organizations can improve their cloud security posture, helping make sure that their cloud infrastructure security strategies remain effective.

How can AWS support your cloud infrastructure security requirements?

Cloud security is a top priority at AWS, and the design of our global infrastructure supports continuous operations. We maintain trust with customers and partners by providing the tools and services needed to help protect applications, data, and workloads at scale. AWS infrastructure spans multiple geographic regions and availability zones, each engineered with layers of physical and logical controls. These safeguards are informed by continuous threat modeling and rigorous testing throughout their lifecycle.

AWS offers a range of cloud infrastructure security services to help safeguard your organizational infrastructure security on AWS.

Amazon GuardDuty helps protect your AWS user accounts, workloads, and data with intelligent threat detection.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) manages and scales workload and workforce access securely, supporting your agility and innovation in AWS.
Amazon Inspector automatically discovers workloads, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images, and AWS Lambda functions, as well as code repositories, and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.
Amazon Macie discovers sensitive data using machine learning and pattern matching, provides visibility into data security risks, and enables automated protection against those risks.
AWS Security Hub prioritizes your critical security issues and helps you respond at scale to protect your environment. It detects critical issues by correlating and enriching signals into actionable insights, enabling a streamlined response. AWS Security Hub includes cloud security posture management (CSPM) to understand your current security posture.

Get started with cloud infrastructure security on AWS by creating a free account today.

What is Cloud Infrastructure Security?