Cloud Security Practices for AWS

Amazon Web Services, currently, is the biggest cloud service platform that outpaces its competitors by a large margin. A large number of businesses have migrated their systems and processes to AWS using experienced AWS Experts from Logicata or similar. There is no doubt it employs the best security technologies to protect your business. However, the onus of security does not lie on the cloud service provider alone; the user also has a critical role to play.

To make things easy for you, we have discussed the best cloud security practices you should use for this platform.

Have a Security Strategy in Place

The cloud environment gives complete control to the user to run your businesses efficiently through the cloud platform. Hence, it is the businesses’ responsibility to have a robust security strategy in place to protect your data on the platform.

First, you need to establish a security strategy and then select the security tools that support your plan. For example, suppose you use configuration management tools. In that case, you need a security tool that can monitor data access, identities, and other devices that are part of your cloud account. 

Have Clear Consistent Controls and Procedures 

According to experts like https://sonraisecurity.com/, most S3 bucket attacks happened because they were set to “Public.” By default, the S3 bucket is set to private. It means only selected identities are allowed to access these buckets. To avoid data breaches, you need to write a clear set of controls and procedures to access them. It should define the type of data the bucket can hold and the identities that can access them. 

Enforce Security to All Layers 

The cloud computing architecture is multi-layered. AWS offers a firewall to protect your cloud account, but that might not be enough. You need to enforce security to all layers of your cloud account.

You can have virtual firewalls to protect different business functions or have 3^rd party applications monitor the traffic or data access.

Encourage a Security Culture 

The user/identity is an essential part of the cloud environment and its security. The user must understand the importance of safety and the steps he/she needs to take to strengthen it. You can train all employees for cloud security to never perform any actions that might expose the system to risks or attacks. 

Keep a Tab on User Access

Most data breaches happen due to ineffective identity and data access management. You need to monitor every user’s data access and purpose. You need to implement the least privileges or access controls to prevent any unauthorized access to sensitive data. 

Suppose any application in your cloud account accesses external data sources. In that case, you need to have tools to validate and encrypt data in transfer to maintain confidentiality and data integrity.

Set Up a Password Policy 

Credential stuffing, brute force attacks, and password cracking are cybersecurity threats to the cloud environment. Hence, your organization needs to have a robust password policy to reduce the probabilities of security breaches. The password policy needs to have set conditions for the creation, modification, and deletion of passwords. 

The rising number of cyber-attacks calls for the need for robust security policies to keep your AWS account secure.