AWS Security Monitoring: Benefits & Framework

Amazon Web Services comes with various built-in tools and technologies to protect cloud deployments. But they’re not enough. You need to gain insights into your critical operational workflows. AWS security monitoring has many layers and if your company doesn’t mature its security operations, the entire organization will be at risk.

We are now in an era that takes a cloud-first business approach. There will be over 100 zettabytes of data stored by the end of 2025; 92% of organizations already have some portion of their IT infrastructure hosted on AWS environments. When BYOD culture combines with remote workforces, it creates new security issues that crop up during the migration process.

Cloud security providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services follow their own security protocols usually. The users are also in charge of certain things and human error can take many forms during data breaches.

We can improve our AWS security monitoring strategy and solve such issues. We wrote this guide to help our readers understand what AWS security monitoring is about. Let’s discuss the AWS security monitoring practices, what to watch out for, and more below.

What is AWS Security Monitoring?

Firstly, remember that AWS always uses a shared responsibility model. It relies on a suite of tools and technologies to let customers see what’s going on inside the environment. They can detect critical security issues before they escalate and become full-blown problems that impact the business.

Every state has its own laws and regulations. All businesses need to meet them or else they could risk getting flagged for data policy or handling violations.

Business requirements are constantly changing and AWS partners with multiple companies and third-party vendors to implement the best security controls. AWS security monitoring allows clients to scale up or down their security as needed. It gives them flexibility, agility, and restricts unwarranted access privileges.

If you are keen on reducing the scope of human error margins, using AWS security monitoring tools is a good start. Your customers will know that their data is kept in safe hands that way. Let’s talk more about the need for AWS security monitoring in 2024 below.

The Need for AWS Security Monitoring

You just can’t minimize cyber risks without AWS security monitoring.

We’re sorry to say this but criminals are getting smarter. Your AWS environment will likely be targeted as your customers continue to upload and share more of their data with these ecosystems.

The good news is you can greatly improve threat visibility and prevent getting taken by surprise. The fastest way to do this is to use a reliable AWS security monitoring solution.

A managed AWS security monitoring strategy can assist your team in dealing with alert fatigue, enhance day-to-day operations, and prevent critical security events from being overlooked or missed. It will serve as an extension of your in-house team; you will also get curated threat intelligence that is up-to-date and ready to use.

A 24/7 AWS security monitoring service secures your cloud workload migrations effortlessly. You will lower IT costs, boost scalability, and it greatly enhance business productivity as a bonus. AWS security monitoring protects your endpoints, SaaS applications, and secures your entire AWS cloud infrastructure.

How does AWS Security Monitoring Work?

An AWS security monitoring tool identifies and prioritizes security risks early on in the development lifecycle. It detects, responds, and implements the best practices to continuously protect workloads. AWS security monitoring improves visibility, compliance, and overall cloud security posture.

It organizes triage and conducts root cause analysis for threats. Businesses end up expediting responses and ensuring robust protection as a result.

Secondly, AWS security monitoring unlocks security innovation. It normalizes and combines data from both on-premise and cloud sources. Get holistic insights and select your chosen analytics tools to further investigate security incidents. AWS security monitoring grants users total ownership and control over their AWS data and resources as well.

AWS Security Monitoring Framework

To make the most use of AWS security monitoring, begin by understanding the AWS security monitoring framework. The AWS architecture provides a variety of useful features and services. As a customer, you simply pay for the storage and resources used. Nothing more, no less.

By default, AWS offers these:

1. Identity and Access Management (IAM) – AWS IAM comes with exclusive role-based access controls. You can scale up or down hybrid workforces and support business ability.
2. CloudTrail – AWS CloudTrail audits your API activities. It integrates with various SIEM tools for comprehensive AWS security monitoring. You can use it to get comprehensive event histories for user activities and behaviors, even archive their event logs..
3. Data Encryption Services – AWS offers services like AWS CloudHSM, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). They encrypt your sensitive data completely, both at rest and in transit.
4. Compliance – Compliance is a critical concern but AWS can help you take care of it. As a business, you will find it easier to conform with the latest regulatory standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA. AWS Artefact and AWS Config are receiving constant updates and stay ahead of the compliance management curve.
5. Threat Detection and Incident Response –AWS Lambda automates incident response. AWS GuardDuty continuously detects and scans for malicious and unauthorized behaviors across AWS accounts. You can combat emerging DDoS threats and potential web exploits by using a combination of AWS Shield and AWS Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). AWS Step Functions orchestrate workflows and services like AWS Disaster Recovery, AWS Backup, and AWS CloudEndure to assist with regular data backup and recovery.

AWS Security Monitoring Benefits

Use AWS security monitoring to delete any unauthorized access or instances associated with your AWS account. You can maintain a good security posture, get complete flexibility, and make critical data less accessible to hackers. Your goal should be to centralize security controls and enhance encryption.

AWS security monitoring will help you do that. You will also cut down costs, reduce business compromise risks, and lessen the need to install additional firewalls. You will get completely protected.

Here is a list of its key benefits:

1. You can encrypt and store your sensitive data using services like Amazon S3 and AWS DynamoDB. AWS security monitoring will streamline the monitoring of your cloud accounts. It provides tools to configure new resources securely and aligns them with the latest regulatory and compliance standards.
2. AWS security monitoring services can help with the auto-scaling of your cloud services. This means that when you’re growing your organization, you can reduce the size of expanding attack surfaces. It creates a safety net and helps your business respond to sudden changes in network traffic without causing disruptions to users or other services.
3. Makes compliance reporting simple. Integrates your AWS activities with existing monitoring solutions. Minimizes cloud vulnerabilities, seals security gaps, and makes your AWS environments more accessible without compromising customer privacy, data integrity, and confidentiality.

AWS Security Monitoring Challenges

AWS security monitoring is not bulletproof and has its flaws. If you aren’t careful, your adversaries can take advantage of your human negligence.

Truth be told, the top AWS security concerns nowadays are misconfigurations, unauthorized data access, and insecure interfaces.

Data volumes are rising which creates new avenues of opportunities for launching new attacks.

One common AWS security challenge is a lack of visibility into these environments. A lack of qualified talent that can handle these AWS security risks is another major issue. There are many other AWS security monitoring challenges we experience which are as follows:

1. Organizations fail or forget to conduct regular AWS vulnerability assessments. There are concerns with using the right Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls; companies forget to disable root API access and ensure proper network security measures. Most don’t apply patches regularly nor restrict outbound traffic enough.
2. Insecure third-party integrations are another common AWS security monitoring challenge. Managing third-party risks is difficult since AWS services can increase in their complexity.
3. Many organizations struggle to manage their AWS resources efficiently. Poor resource allocation can cost them a lot of time, money, and wasted energy. It makes it harder to pinpoint and backtrack threats on time as well, thus greatly diminishing rapid incident response.
4. Cloud environments can change very quickly which means AWS environments can become highly dynamic. There are changes that the infrastructure is not configured properly. Outdated technologies, insecure resources, and a lack of unified data make it harder to get a true sense of an organization’s real-time AWS security posture. You can’t just take your existing cloud security tactics and apply them to AWS environments since they operate differently.
5. One of the biggest AWS security risks is the use of static AWS access keys. Your hard-coded credentials can become vulnerable and quickly exploited by malicious actors. Overly permissive IAM roles can create a wider attack surface. It can greatly increase the blast radius which could compromise user accounts or applications.
6. Unencrypted data can be easily accessed by third parties. Many users store their data in EBS volumes, S3 buckets, and RDS instances without applying proper encryption. This can lead to potential data breaches and compliance policy violations.

AWS Security Monitoring Best Practices

Using strong AWS security monitoring practices is just as valuable as protecting sensitive data on the cloud. Although 95% of security issues can be due to the customer’s fault, we can’t deny that AWS security by itself is very important. Now that you’re aware of this, let’s move on to our list of AWS security monitoring best practices:

1. Plan ahead. Your first priority should be to secure your AWS environment before you adopt it. Define security baselines for your AWS environments, pre-production, and post-production. Reevaluate these baselines every six months and revise them.
2. You can consolidate your AWS security risk monitoring by using a VM solution with built-in misconfiguration detection capabilities. Use a high-quality Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution to monitor AWS accounts from multiple cloud providers and enforce these baselines. This will greatly reduce the burden on your security team and make sure you miss nothing.
3. Start by applying the principle of least privilege access for all your AWS accounts. Grant only necessary permissions and make frequent IAM policy updates during development.
4. Review and audit these IAM policies regularly. You need to remove excessive privileges and make this an ongoing part of your AWS security monitoring process. To do this, you can also implement IAM constraints and use service control policies (SCPs). This will help you restrict unauthorized actions across multiple accounts and prevent granting overly broad permissions.
5. AWS offers multiple encryption options that cover various stages of the data life cycle. Use server-side encryption to manage Amazon S3-managed keys and customer-provided keys. Apply RDS encryption in transit with SSL/TLS, and encryption at rest with AWS-managed keys and customer-managed keys. For EBS, you can use EBS encryption for both. Delete all access keys for the root user and lock away the MFA device. Use very complex passwords and manage employee access to AWS resources by using federated SSO. Regularly rotate your AWS access keys.
6. Public, unsecured S3 storage is another common AWS security risk. We can use S3 Block Public Access settings for all buckets to limit public access to AWS objects and buckets. It’s a good idea to set resource-based policies in addition to this and authenticate bucket access using IAM roles alone.
7. You should stream AWS logs to CloudWatch for centralized monitoring and analysis. Ensure comprehensive logging by configuring your EC2 instances and installing CloudWatch agents. Use logging policies at the application or service level for your EKS clusters and Lambda functions.
8. To get more visibility into your API usage and user activity, enable CloudTrail. This will help you detect and investigate potential security threats quickly and maximize visibility. You can make a comprehensive audit trail of all your security activities by doing this.
9. Make it a habit to scan your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates before deployments. Use AWS Config to monitor resource configurations and keep an eye on all changes or deviations from your desired states. You can set custom AWS Config rules to evaluate resource compliance and align it with your organization’s expectations.
10. There are many native AWS security tools organizations neglect to use to boost their AWS security posture. Avoid missing out on their benefits.  For example, you can use Amazon Macie to discover and protect sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. It can classify, categorize, and identify your data and provide the best data security recommendations. GuardDuty is an excellent tool for monitoring malicious activity, unauthorized deployments, and compromised instances. You can use the AWS Security Hub to centralize your findings, alerts, and track compliance status

SentinelOne for AWS Security Monitoring

If you are looking for enterprise-wide powered by AI to secure the cloud, then look no further than Security for AWS from SentinelOne. SentinelOne offers a powerful and comprehensive AI-powered CNAPP that delivers real-time protection, detection, and response for your enterprise. It can be hosted in multiple AWS regions around the world. CNAPP includes various features like Cloud Detection & Response (CDR), Cloud Workload Security (CWS), Infrastructure as Code Security (IaC), and more.

You get one platform to unify code-to-cloud security. Get a full view of your digital environment and provide context and correlation with automated remediation. Conduct agentless vulnerability assessments and use the Secret Scanner to detect more than 750+ secret types across your public and private cloud repos.

SentinelOne integration for Security Hub delivers high-fidelity threat information from SentinelOne agents running on AWS workloads to AWS Security Hub. It aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security alerts; SentinelOne AWS Security Hub enables security teams to prioritize and respond to threats effectively.

Think like an attacker with Verified Exploit Paths™ and its unique Offensive Security Engine. You can simulate attacks on your AWS infrastructure safely and find out the root causes of exploits. SentinelOne is a trusted AWS partner and helps keep your cloud secure.

It offers over 7 AWS competencies and designations, including more than 20 AWS integrations. You can boost your integrations’ resilience with AWS Backup and Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery. Enhance your AWS visibility and threat-hunting capabilities using its seamless integrations for AppFabric,  Security Hub, GuardDuty, and Amazon Security Lake.

SentinelOne provides unparalleled cloud protection for your entire AWS environment. It leverages advanced real-time protection for Amazon EC2, EKS, ECS, S3, FSxN, and NetApp filers. It also facilitates simple and DevOps-friendly AWS deployments.

You can get all SentinelOne solutions directly from the AWS marketplace, including CPPO and private offers. To schedule a free live demo and to test out the platform’s AWS security monitoring features, simply get in touch with the SentinelOne team. They will offer you a customized quote for your business.

Conclusion

AWS security monitoring plays a great role in keeping a firm cloud security posture. As enterprises move towards a cloud-first approach and the data stored on AWS continues to grow, effective security monitoring is needed to mitigate cyber risks. Organizations can take advantage of the diverse AWS resources available for security monitoring as well. They can gain full control and ownership over their assets by using AWS security monitoring tools like SentinelOne.

Understanding these challenges and best practices of AWS security monitoring will limit human error, misconfiguration, unauthorized access and help in maintaining the confidentiality, integrity & availability of their sensitive data.