As a growing percentage of corporations worldwide use Amazon Web Services as their go-to cloud resource, AWS security has become paramount. Cloud security has always confused even hardened security professionals due to the shared responsibilities it creates. While your cloud service provider (CSP) is responsible for some security aspects, you are equally responsible for others.

AWS security is therefore a joint effort you must invest in. Failure to properly recognize the responsibility map might lead to serious negative consequences- ones you would rather avoid.

Here are three tips to ensure top-notch AWS security in your company.

Plan and understand the cloud

The cloud environment differs from on-premise ones in a few significant ways. First, it is possible to add infrastructure to the cloud instantly with the right credentials. Unlike on-prem installations that take a long time and need several approvals, automation and ease of expansion are central cloud themes.

Thus, you cannot implement similar expansion approval processes when dealing with the cloud. Take the time to familiarize yourself with the rapid rate of change and deployment ease. Another hurdle specific to AWS is the sheer number of acronyms Amazon throws at security teams.

Learn what an S3 is and how it differs from an EC2. Understand how to deploy AMIs and when VPCs make sense. These acronyms will confuse you at first but learning them before deploying AWS will prevent security headaches down the road.

Install a cloud-first culture in your team too. Many team members tend to stick to old principles when dealing with cloud assets, resulting in insufficient security coverage. Culture comes from the top and you must drill the importance of the cloud into your team, helping them acclimate to environmental changes and new processes.

Create and enforce a security baseline

Security baselines function as internal benchmarks for your security and DevOps teams. In short, they help you understand what your environment must look like in normal conditions and if your current state has deviated from it significantly.

Planning is critical once again, as with the previous step. Encourage your security and DevOps teams to collaborate and define a baseline. Critically, define asset configuration protocols when responding to an incident. You can use the CIS benchmarks resource as a guiding light in this regard. Consider hiring an AWS solutions architect to guide you if this task proves too tough.

Evaluate your baseline every six months to make sure it isn’t obsolete. Apply it evenly to all prod and dev environments. Enforcing baselines is a separate task and you must give your developers preconfigured infrastructure templates that make enforcement easy. More importantly, they won’t slow down your CI/CD pipeline.

Use the AWS Security Hub to monitor changes to your baseline and monitor your cloud environment configurations. Note that the Security Hub forces you to define all configuration rules. A third-party vendor can do this for you but at an additional cost. So evaluate your trade-offs here.

Define access protocols

Cloud Security Posture Management or CSPM solutions are essential to monitoring cloud security. CSPMs help you monitor multiple cloud accounts, including AWS misconfigurations. They also help you automate configuration fixes, reducing your security team’s burden.

CSPMs usually include Identity Access Management (IAM) modules that help you limit cloud access, reducing the chances of a breach. When enforcing IAM protocols, make sure you avoid some common mistakes. The first mistake to avoid is not securing your root user. The root user is associated with the account used to create your AWS account.

It’s best to never use this credential beyond account creation. Enforce MFA as standard and secure the device connected to the account. Additionally, you must use your CSPM’s IAM functionality to enforce federated SSO logins. This will help you centrally manage access to your AWS instance.

Classify all users and roles into groups and create access policies at that level. This practice helps you standardize access across your organization. Fail to do this and you’ll have to create policies for each user, leading to custom policies and a nightmare to enforce.

Examine your repository for unused or lightly used credentials and delete them. Typically, some unused credentials belong to executive team members. These credentials do not need to exist since those roles rarely access technical details. You can serve them better by offering reports or self-service analytics.

Use time-based access for credentials to minimize the chances of a rogue user wreaking havoc by processing several infrastructure changes at once.

AWS security needs a new approach

AWS and cloud security are different paradigms compared to on-prem practices. Follow the tips in this article to install robust AWS security and you’ll have no issues securing your data at all times.