Understanding Essential AWS-native Security Services
- Paul Tompkins (Unlicensed)
AWS Security Hub is a comprehensive service that provides a centralized view of your security state across AWS accounts. It aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security alerts (findings) from multiple AWS services and third-party products to help you identify and respond to security issues. Security Hub uses standards and best practices such as AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, and PCI DSS.
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service designed for DevOps engineers, developers, and IT managers. It provides data and actionable insights to monitor applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events.
AWS CloudTrail enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. This service provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services.
AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. This helps you with compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
AWS Automated Security Response solutions are designed to automatically respond to security events in your AWS environment. By using AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Step Functions, you can create automated workflows to detect, react to, and mitigate security threats in real-time, helping to maintain your security posture without manual intervention.
AWS Systems Manager provides a unified user interface to view and control your AWS resources. It simplifies resource and application management, shortens the time to detect and resolve operational issues, and helps you manage your AWS infrastructure securely at scale. Systems Manager integrates with other AWS services to help you manage infrastructure across AWS accounts, regions, and hybrid environments.
Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data. It uses machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence to identify and prioritize potential threats. GuardDuty can detect a wide range of suspicious activities, such as compromised instances and reconnaissance activities.
Amazon Macie is a data security and privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and protect your sensitive data in AWS. Macie automates the discovery of sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), and provides dashboards and alerts that give visibility into how this data is being accessed or moved. It helps ensure compliance with regulations and standards.