List of the Most Important AWS Security Tools for Your Success

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is undoubtedly revolutionary, especially in its ability to allow the companies to dynamically scale its infrastructure and applications. Amazon has also been very great at including security features in most of its offerings.

Of course, Amazon is responsible for securing its own infrastructure. The organization always makes it very clear that the users must ensure that AWS services are configured properly according to best practices. It’s good that it has provided a lot of suggestions to make this easy and possible. If there is one thing that Amazon takes very seriously in its Cloud computing services, then it must be layered security. The company provides the administrators with great tools to ensure that all their AWS deployments are very secure. In most cases, it is just a matter of simply subscribing to the service.

Without much ado, let us look at some of the most important AWS security tools available. Check them out

1. GuardDuty

Known as the wall watcher, GuardDuty is a service that detects threats. It is very simple to deploy. Besides, this service perfectly scales with your infrastructure. GuardDuty will analyze your logs throughout all of your services and accounts to ensure that there is nothing left unprotected. According to Amazon, this tool has the capability to analyze tens of billions of various events across AWS. It also leverages machine-learning in order to ensure that you are getting actionable and accurate alerts.

GuardDuty can also detect the activities that are related to account compromise, instance compromise, and reconnaissance. This encompasses a number of things, such as data exfiltration, attempts at disabling logins, unusual API calls, port scanning, and malware. Amazon says that this service is designed to be a ‘hand-off’ tool. Therefore, you won’t be able to write custom alerts of your own. In simple terms, GuardDuty is a tool that analyzes all your logs to save you the hustle.

2. AWS Shield

This is a managed DDoS protection service that provides security to EC2, CloudFront, Route 53 resources, Global Accelerator, and Load balancers. Of course, DDoS protection might not seem revolutionary. However, Amazon claims that about 99% of all the infrastructure flood attacks that are detected by AWS Shield are usually mitigated in not more than a second on CloudFront.

Sometimes attacks are designed simply to prevent a specific company from doing its business. So, having the AWS security tool such as AWS Shield that allows you to stay up even without having to engage your security team is something that can give you a substantial competitive edge. This service can also protect websites, which are not hosted inside Amazon Web Services. In simple terms, AWS Shield is a tool that will keep your services available at a matchless success rate.

3. CloudWatch

This is usually described as the AWS security tool that monitors everything. CloudWatch ingests metrics, logs, and events across your entire AWS infrastructure in order to ensure that you have visibility into almost everything that is going on in your ecosystem.

If you have ever worked with SIEM data, you definitely know that having a tool that has the capability to aggregate a load of data and ensure that the engineers can access it easily is critical. As this service can provide a ton of surrounding information and integrates with GuardDuty, CloudWatch can also make it very easy to troubleshoot security incidents. Apart from its security applications, this tool also aggregates resource utilization data and performance. It can also be used in setting up auto-scaling for EC2 instances so as to automatically remove or add computer resources to ensure that the organizations are getting the best value for their money when they invest in AWS services.

4. AWS Inspector

Being proactive is one of the best practices. AWS Inspector is just a security assessment tool that searches for vulnerabilities and scans AWS applications. One of the best things about this service is that the administrators will be getting consistent improvement as best practices are updated by the AWS security team. Building security standards and compliance into application deployment and infrastructure gives an organization a significant head start in remaining secure. The best part of this tool is that it is always relevant.

5. Macie

This is a machine-learning service, which watches data access trends and detects anomalies to spot unauthorized data access and data leaks. This AWS security tool is all about protecting data. It can send its alerts to CloudWatch in order to leverage all custom and automation alerts. Being a fully managed service, you should find it easier and more practical to add extra visibility and alerting without doing extra work. Currently, it only supports monitoring S3 buckets. Macie allows the companies to know whether their data is compromised or not.

6. Prowler

This is a third-party service that is described as an AWS best practice assessment, forensic readiness, defense, and audit tool. It is a great compliance and configuration scanner, in which the open-source community has been developed. It boasts 98 pages that span configuration areas, such as networking, identity management, and configurations that are related to HIPAA and GDPR.

7. ScoutSuite

Just like Prowler, ScoutSuite is also a great audit tool. The main difference between these two services is that ScoutSuite is a multi-platform that supports Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform.

Conclusion

Even though audit tools may not be as exciting as some of the other AWS security services highlighted here, their importance cannot be overstated. Actually, some of the world’s worst data breaches on Amazon Web Services have been due to very simple misconfigurations that might have earlier looked insignificant. Simple things such as allowing write or public access to AWS S3 buckets have resulted in data breaches of large scale. The first step to ensuring there is no data breach is to start with a very solid security foundation.