Never incorporate personal information:
- date of birth,
- social insurance number
- first name of your children,
and your passwords and usernames.
3 Takeaways From The First AWS Conference Dedicated to Cloud Security The first Amazon Web Services (AWS) event dedicated to security, AWS Re:Inforce, was held in Boston on June 25 and 26, 2019. Fortica, partner of Hitachi Systems Security (read full press release here), was among the 5,000 cloud security experts who attended this important conference. These two days were an opportunity to discuss the challenges of cloud security, well beyond the specific contexts of AWS. For those of you who couldn’t attend but are interested in the topics of cloud security or AWS, we’ve put together a summary in three points, as if you were there. Opportunities to comply with and align with the most demanding security practices in the AWS public cloud have been widely promoted. Several major players in the North American financial industry, including CapitalOne, outlined their approach. AWS offers a secure default configuration with a large number of security services to meet a multitude of needs and scenarios. The standardization of security policies through the installation of guardrails was a major theme that was discussed both during sessions and during sponsors' demonstrations. It is about defining the security and context-specific boundaries within which development teams can be autonomous. Ideally, security policies can be reused through the use of labels (for example, a developer can modify the roles of its hosted application in an environment labeled "Test" but not in "Production"). Steve Schmidt, AWS CISO, announced the launch of Control Tower, a service that enables uniform security and cloud compliance policies across multiple accounts within the same organization. Cloud visibility and cloud security posture assessments was one of the other big themes that were very much discussed but also widely represented among the sponsors grouped at the Security Hub. Multi-cloud information systems, the autonomy of DevOps teams, the simplicity of deploying resources in the cloud create configuration problems and inevitable vulnerabilities that expose data. There are solutions for detecting anomalies as early as possible, even before planning the resources by analyzing CloudFormation templates, which can be used to raise alerts or automatically correct configuration discrepancies. Equivalent solutions that are natively offered by AWS, are effective in meeting basic but limited to AWS needs. In a more complex, more demanding or in a multi-cloud environment, a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution will be a must. In Closing This first AWS event dedicated to cloud security has kept all its promises by highlighting emerging security practices and innovative solutions. The AWS Re:Inforce conference becomes a must-attend event for all cloud security experts. The next edition is already announced – it will take place in Houston, TX, in 2020. In the meantime, Hitachi Systems Security and Fortica are keeping up-to-date with innovations and trends in cloud security and our its practices to benefit our customers. If you have questions about the security of your cloud, either for an audit or a deployment coaching, we have the expertise and services to meet your needs to secure your critical assets along your path towards the cloud. Our cloud security experts take all the necessary efforts to keep up with this fast-changing industry in order to offer you the most relevant recommendations and to ensure that you can maximize the return on your cloud security investments.
