What are Security Services in AWS?
Security is a basic concern for organizations to work without any hassle or worry of stolen data and cyber-attacks. Amazon offers a number of services that ensure security protocols to safeguard data and account access. This guide will help in understanding the security services and their use cases offered by Amazon. Some of these services are:
Let us briefly explain these services:
AWS IAM Identity Center
This service offers control over users and user groups access. Using this service, it becomes quite simple and easy to allocate permissions and access to specific users. It also allows allocation of resources according to the type of users.
Let us look at a scenario where role access is administered. This service is used to create a specific role for Data Lake. Whenever a user accesses the “AWS Lake Formation” service, this already-created role will be provided to the user. A pictorial representation of this work can be seen below:
AWS Shield
Distributed Denial of Service or DDOS attacks are the most common attacks to overload servers of web applications which results in application downtime.
Shield provides a solution to tackle DDOS attacks by using “AWS WAF” and “AWS Firewall Manager”. The basic working of this service can be seen below:
Amazon Inspector
This service continually scans the workloads and manages any vulnerabilities that come forward. This service also maintains a database of vulnerabilities and provides faster results.
The first step that it conducts is continuous scanning to figure out the vulnerabilities in running workloads and then save these vulnerabilities to a database. Then it provides a risk score for the vulnerabilities that can be fixed with other services such as ECR and EvenBridge. A pictorial representation is given below:
Amazon GuardDuty
It is a serverless cloud monitoring tool that uses machine learning algorithms to keep a check on user accounts and workloads for any unusual activity and malware detection.
This service monitors user accounts, databases, S3 buckets, and workloads. If any malware detection or unusual behavior comes up, this service uses Lambda to automate its prevention. The pictorial description of its working is given below:
AWS Certificate Manager
Certificate Manager is another cloud service that not only provides a number of private and public certificates but also manages them. It also allows the user to import certificates.
This service works by providing or managing a certificate for API gateways and load balancers for authentication. Any unusual activity regarding these certificates is then monitored by other services such as CloudWatch and EventBridge. Its working can be seen below:
Amazon Cognito
Cognito is one of the cloud security services provided by the platforms. This service typically authenticates and manages user and enterprise access for an application that is deployed using any cloud solution.
It works by verifying and recording user sign-up data which is then later used for authentication through any third-party login methods. After this, user access is controlled by the attached policies regarding the application. A pictorial description of its working is given below:
Amazon Detective
Detective is another security-related cloud service for the investigation of potential security hazards which is used with other cloud services to visualize the data of potential issues.
It works by investigating potential security issues and saving records in the form of logs which are used by other services such as Inspector and GuardDuty to visualize the security threats in the form of graphs. Its working can be understood by the figure given below:
These were the most important and frequently used security services offered by AWS. Check out the complete list of these security solutions from here.
Conclusion
Amazon offers a large and versatile number of cloud-based security solutions. These control and manage access, detect unusual activity and behavior, detect malware detection, enforce policies and rules, and provide risk assessment. Some of these services also provide a visual representation of vulnerabilities through graphs and charts. This article has explained some of the best security services by AWS.
Source: linuxhint.com