TOP 3 AWS CLOUD SECURITY RISKS

1. TOP 3 AWS CLOUD SECURITY RISKS

2. The market share data posted on several websites indicate that many enterprises prefer Amazon Web Services (AWS) to other public cloud platforms. AWS provides a number of features to keep the business resources secure and meet compliance requirements. It has been rolling out new security control mechanisms and tools regularly to improve user management, deploy code securely, tackle AWS cloud security risks and access AWS services safely.

3. Recently, AWS rolled out a new security service called – Amazon Macie that uses machine learning to prevent data loss by discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data in AWS automatically. But the enterprises still need to take a number of steps to strengthen cloud security and prevent security attacks. It is also important for enterprises to know the common AWS security risks to use the security control mechanisms provided by AWS more effectively.

4. Excess Privileges and Access Right Granted to Users The Identity and Access Management (IAM) web service provided by AWS helps enterprises to control the way users access and control AWS resources. IAM further makes it easier for administrators to create and manage privileges for individual AWS users. The administrator can also grant permission to users to access the data objects stored in layers through the Simple Storage Service (S3). But the administrators often cause cloud security issues by grading excess privileges and access rights to individual users. The administrator needs to ensure that no unnecessary permission to granted to individual users. Likewise, he needs to remove inactive users, review permissions, and rotate credentials on a regular basis.

5. Lack of Security Invisibility The enterprise data and resources stored on AWS are accessed by a large number of people across the organisation. No administrator can monitor the resources accessed by individual users on a daily basis. Hence, he cannot detect the malicious activities and unauthorized data access on time, which increases AWS cloud security risks. But he can focus on security visibility on AWS to detect malicious user activities immediately. In addition to detecting malicious user activities by analyzing the logs, the administrator also needs to check if a specific malicious activities or security attack is being carried out at specific time and on specific servers. At the same time, the administrator must focus on the internal activities that lead to security issues – abnormal login attempts, unusual network activity, important file changes, and unauthorized installations.

6. Not Implementing Data Protection Mechanism Often enterprises forget that data protection and information security is not the sole responsibility of the cloud vendor. They do not take advantage of the robust security control mechanisms provided by the cloud vendor to optimize data protection and prevent data breaches. Various AWS services – S3, EBS and RDS – provide a number of features to protect data and prevent data breaches. But administrators often ignore the significance of availing and implementing the security mechanisms. They can easily improve data protection by implementing the security features provided by AWS – access permission, encryption, replication, versioning, backup and data integrity authentication. Likewise, they need to use encryption technologies to keep the data secure during transmission.

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