As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” And this could not be more true when it comes to cloud infrastructure security. Security in the cloud has always been a hot topic, and for good reason – cloud environments are particularly susceptible to security breaches. One of the reasons for the holes in security setup could be that cloud security is modeled as “shared responsibility” between the cloud and the provider. We wrote a blog on the topic last week.
While many organizations take a reactive approach to security, focusing on patching and incident response after an attack has occurred, there is a growing movement toward proactive security strategies. In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of proactive cloud infrastructure security and some tips for getting started with a specific focus on AWS.
Prioritizing security in your cloud adoption strategy is essential to ensuring the safety of your applications and data. The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides guidelines on how to build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient systems in the cloud. By following these best practices, you can help ensure that your assets are safe and secure in the cloud. Some of the key recommendations include using strong encryption for data at rest and in transit, using least privilege access controls, and monitoring our systems for unusual activity.
Here is a brief overview of the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:
Operational Excellence
Monitoring and adapting to changes in real-time, being responsive when an event occurs that needs your attention. Automating routine tasks so you can focus on more important matters is key to managing operations efficiently.
Security
The best way to protect what you have is by establishing controls and strictly implementing methods of least privileges.
Reliability
Your systems are reliable only if they can recover from disaster, and adapt to change
Performance Efficiency
Performance efficiency can only be obtained if your systems are able to only provide the resources necessary to complete the workloads in accordance with business needs.
Cost Optimization
Given the workload and time it needs to finish, you must consider off-peak hour usage to reduce your compute and cloud costs
Sustainability
Optimize your resource utilization by following the best practices, and you have got yourself a sustainable system.
The adoption of proactive philosophy in your organization prepares you to anticipate and adapt to new threats. With the implementation of a threat-modeling process that involves identifying, understanding, communicating, and mitigating potential threats, you can better prepare your organization for sniffing out threats and taking action to stop them ahead of time. Additionally, threat modeling can help to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your systems.
By taking proactive measures to plan for and prevent potential threats to your cloud infrastructure security, you can save a lot of time, money, and trouble in the long run. By setting up locks and checkpoints, you can ensure that only authorized personnel have access to the systems they are responsible for and no more. And by regularly inspecting and maintaining these locks and checkpoints, you can help to ensure that your cloud assets are always safe from potential harm. By taking these proactive measures, you can help to prevent a lot of potential issues related to cloud security vulnerabilities and gain higher customer satisfaction for securing their data.
Wrap Up
As more businesses move to the cloud, it is increasingly important for organizations to adopt a proactive security strategy. This means taking steps to prevent attacks before they happen, rather than waiting for an incident to occur and then trying to mitigate the damage.
Our team of experts at High Plains Computing specializes in completing AWS cloud infrastructure security reviews, providing you with a comprehensive list of recommendations to plug the holes and further secure your AWS infrastructure. Review our AWS Security write-up for further details.
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