Securing software engineering and operational processes has become increasingly challenging over the past decade. The majority of workloads have been migrated to the cloud, and a larger number of engineers are now working remotely. If your organization employs a cloud-native architecture, there might be hybrid deployments that include both cloud and on-premises resources, thereby expanding your attack surface even further.
AWS Security Hub is a valuable tool for ensuring the security posture of your workloads. Nevertheless, Check Point CloudGuard allows you to elevate your cloud-native security capabilities. It enhances the user experience of AWS Security Hub users by providing additional context and increased visibility into hybrid architectures. Furthermore, it offers a consolidated view of your security posture, covering all resources throughout the software development lifecycle—from code to cloud.
This article will delve into the fundamentals of AWS Security Hub, examine its business value and limitations, and explain how CloudGuard bridges the gaps in securing cloud-native and digital transformation projects.
What Is AWS Security Hub?
AWS Security Hub provides a central view of your security posture and compliance status within AWS accounts and services. It aggregates data from Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Macie and uses this data to perform several actions.
The service will send a finding alert when there is a misconfiguration, it can also be configured to send events and reports to upstream systems such as email, chat, and ticketing. Additionally, it provides mechanisms to help remediate security issues, unburdening your engineers from tasks like browsing multiple accounts and services for potential issues and fixing them.
By default, AWS Security Hub offers these features only for AWS environments; however, since it allows the integration of external data sources, you can use tools such as Check Point CloudGuard to broaden its scope to resources outside of AWS.
How Does AWS Security Hub Help Maintain Compliance with Security Standards and Best Practices?
AWS Security Hub’s automated compliance checks work with well-known security standards, so you don’t have to maintain a list of requirements.
Supported standards are:
- AWS Foundational Security Best Practices (FSBP)
- Center for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark v1.2.0 and v1.4.0
- National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP 800-53 Rev. 5
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
- Service-Managed Standard: AWS Control Tower
AWS Security Hub monitors and checks your workloads against these standards and then consolidates the results for convenient viewing. Recurring reports, delivered by email, ensure that every stakeholder is up-to-date on the goings-on, while remediation recommendations eliminate the guesswork that can typically prevent you from taking action.
What Are the Benefits of Integrating AWS Security Hub with Check Point CloudGuard?
AWS Security Hub is a full-fledged service offering security best practice checks, aggregated alerts, and the frameworks to help automated remediation. CloudGuard enhances AWS Security Hub to cover additional use cases. CloudGuard can extend AWS Security Hub functionality to work seamlessly with multi-region or hybrid deployments—even if these regions are highly isolated or if your application is in the process of a digital transformation and has a hybrid architecture. Let’s go over the primary benefits of integrating with CloudGuard.
Automated Regulatory Compliance
The automation features of CloudGuard are the most vital reasons for integration. They lower your teams’ tasks at hand while allowing you to enforce compliance with gold standards and regulatory requirements.
Humans are flexible thinkers, but with repetitive work, overlooking crucial details becomes more likely with each iteration. In the context of security and compliance, this is unacceptable. The automation of compliance tasks ensures that nothing slips through the cracks and engineers can then use their time for more creative work.
Fewer False Positives
CloudGuard’s contextual AI engine gives you deep security insights across cloud workloads, which help to reduce false positives. Additionally, with CloudGuard Effective Risk Management, your engineers won’t have to review each alert before they prioritize what to fix and can focus on the most exposed assets first.
False positives (i.e., discovering a threat is not a threat) aren’t as bad as false negatives (i.e., missing real threats). However, if you get too many false positives, they will distract the operations team and even lead them to ignore real threats in the future. In the worst cases, false positives can make up the majority of alerts, rendering your security monitoring useless.
Continuous Compliance
CloudGuard Network Security offers several features contributing to continuous cloud environment compliance.
Compliance enforcement is instrumental in maintaining adherence to industry standards like PCI DSS and HIPAA. It provides detailed audit trails and enforces security policies, allowing organizations to demonstrate their commitment to these regulations.
The visibility and monitoring capabilities of CloudGuard are essential for continuous oversight. Generating detailed logs and network traffic reports, along with integrating with AWS CloudWatch for real-time alerts, enables prompt identification and resolution of potential compliance issues.
Automated security management also plays a crucial role in maintaining compliance. As cloud environments evolve, automatic policy updates ensure your security posture remains compliant without requiring human mediation. It thus lowers the risk of human error leading to non-compliance.
Access control mechanisms within CloudGuard additionally help you meet regulatory requirements by making sure that only authorized individuals have access to sensitive data or systems. This includes identity-based access control and secure VPN access for remote users.
Standardized Configuration in Hybrid Deployments
CloudGuard’s unified cloud-native security approach streamlines configuration across the SDLC and workloads. This means that all your workloads can be monitored from one window using one configuration language, even with hybrid approaches that include cloud and on-premises deployments. This reduces context switching and the potential for human error, which, in turn, allows for more consistency between on-premises and cloud environments.
How to Integrate AWS Security Hub with Check Point CloudGuard?
CloudGuard has an official AWS Security Hub third-party integration, so it just takes a few minutes to get started. For more details, check out this 3-minute video that explains the integration step by step.
If you need individual integration support or are interested in more than just the AWS Security Hub integration, our sales team is happy to help.
Summary
Using AWS Security Hub to keep the security and compliance of your cloud workloads in check is a smart choice. Integrating it with Check Point CloudGuard takes it to the next level.
Enable consolidated cloud-native threat detection for cross-cloud, cross-account, and even cross-region workloads, including GovCloud, China, and on-premises. Minimize false positives with context-aware threat filters, and automate compliance with standards and regulations to ease the burden on your engineers.