Bolstering Your AWS Security

How to bolster your SaaS security posture 

Four steps to overcome cybersecurity challenges and protect your company 

Your fast-growing SaaS company needs to focus on the most significant growth drivers – your product and customer base. Understandably, managing your cloud security posture can take a back seat to more immediate business priorities. The problem is that weak security configurations can lead to data breaches. Data breaches lead to unhappy customers and can result in significant financial losses. That slows you down and threatens to derail your success altogether.

In this blog, we'll show you how to improve your AWS security posture and focus on those all-important growth tasks – without worrying about imminent security threats.

Recent AWS security features offer cutting-edge protection. Staying on top of the recent updates is crucial. Here's a closer look at these essential tools:

• AWS Security Hub: Gain real-time insights and threat detection for your AWS environment with Security Hub. It aggregates security findings from various services and helps you prioritise and remediate potential security issues.
• Amazon GuardDuty: Automatically monitor your AWS accounts for suspicious activity and unauthorised access. GuardDuty uses machine learning to identify anomalies and potential threats.
• AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF): Secure your web applications against common web exploits with AWS WAF. It provides protection against SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other attacks.
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): Manage user access and permissions to secure your AWS resources effectively. IAM allows you to define fine-grained access controls, ensuring the principle of least privilege.
  

To build a secure and reliable SaaS solution on AWS, consider aligning with the AWS Well-Architected Framework's Security pillar.

Within the security pillar, you are advised to adopt best practices for data protection, identity management, and threat detection. We recommend leveraging AWS security services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained access control and AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for data encryption.

Security posture refers to your overall status of cybersecurity readiness. It requires a thorough understanding of all the systems and processes you must safeguard to create a security roadmap and address potential gaps.

Here's what it measures:

• Level of asset inventory and attack surface visibility
• Control measures to protect your business from cyber-attacks
• Capabilities to detect and contain attacks and react and recover from security events.

4. Improving SaaS security posture 

To optimise your security posture, you need to:

• Analyse your current security posture
• Identify possible gaps
• Take action to eliminate those gaps
• Repeat to strengthen your security posture continuously

Your resources, people, and tech stack are constantly changing. The key goal is to regularly review the state of your security, report on issues, and ensure that they're being addressed promptly to reduce your risk level.

It's usually cheaper to mitigate risk than to let it bubble away and eventually get attacked. You could lose a lot of customer data and, even more detrimental, destroy your reputation.

Parallo Security Posture Reporting Service

We created our Security Posture Reporting Service to ensure that your SaaS company has an ongoing process for reporting security issues, and we provide remediation recommendations to improve security and reduce risk moving forward.

Key metric: What's your Secure Score?

AWS Secure Score is a measure of your AWS environment's security posture. It provides recommendations for improving your security based on best practices. A higher score indicates a more secure environment.

We recommend using AWS security tools and services, like AWS Security Hub, AWS GuardDuty, and IAM, to improve your AWS Secure Score. In addition to monitoring your AWS Secure Score, you can actively track and enhance your AWS security posture. These services and practices help identify where risks are, achieve a higher Secure Score and improve the overall security of your AWS environment based on best practices and real-time threat detection.

Most customers come into the service with a Secure Score of around 20-30%. Within three to six months, we'd expect to see their level of risk dramatically reduce and a Secure Score improve to 80%+.

Once you've reached that point, you have the peace of mind of knowing you have visibility and an ongoing assessment of security vulnerabilities.

Regular review and optimisation = strong security posture

In our experience, customers willing to address security issues quickly get the best security posture results. You might not have the in-house expertise or available financial resources to constantly assess your security posture internally, and that's where the Parallo team can add value. We help you extract the necessary information to create processes and plans to mitigate risks. That way, you can focus on what's important – your product, not your platform.

If you would like to learn more about our Security Posture Reporting or Managed Services for AWS or Azure, please reach out to our team today.