AWS Security Hub: What is it and how can you benefit?
If your business is based on AWS or operates in a multi-cloud environment, AWS Security Hub could be beneficial to you. But what is it, and how can it help? This blog aims to provide a high-level overview of its features and benefits.
AWS Security Hub is a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) service designed to streamline security operations by automating best practice checks, aggregating alerts and supporting automated remediation.
Here we will break down some of its key features:
Automated Security Checks: Security Hub conducts continuous security best practice checks against AWS resources, helping identify misconfigurations and ensuring compliance with industry standards such as CIS, PCI DSS, and NIST. This provides ongoing security assessment of cloud assets for your business.
Centralised Alert Management: Aggregates security alerts from AWS services like Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Macie, as well as from third-party security products, into a single, standardized format. This helps reduce the complexity of managing security alerts, with the main benefit being a single pane of glass for security alerting.
Visualisation and Insights: Provides a customizable dashboard to visualize security data, identify patterns, and prioritize responses to threats. This aids in the faster identification and remediation of vulnerabilities.
Cross-Region and Multi-Account Support: Supports cross-region aggregation of findings and can consolidate alerts across multiple AWS accounts, making it easier to manage security across large organizations. If you have a global reach and need to ensure you are monitoring assets distributed across regions, this feature helps significantly.
Automation and Integration: Offers automation features for triaging and remediating security issues, including integration with Amazon EventBridge to trigger automatic responses. There are also defined integrations with the ITSM tool ServiceNow, which is taking the enterprise market by storm.
Benefits for Enterprise Businesses
So what are the benefits for enterprise businesses:
Improved Security Posture: By automating security checks and providing a comprehensive view of security alerts, enterprises can maintain a robust security posture and quickly address vulnerabilities.
Efficiency and Cost Savings: Centralised management of security alerts and automated remediation reduces the time and effort required to manage security issues, leading to greater operational efficiency and cost savings.
Scalability: With support for multiple accounts and regions, Security Hub is well-suited for large enterprises with complex AWS environments.
Compliance Management: Simplifies compliance with various industry standards, helping enterprises ensure that their AWS environments meet regulatory requirements.
Downsides for Enterprise Businesses
Despite its benefits, there are some potential downsides to consider:
Cost: While Security Hub offers a free tier and a 30-day free trial, enterprises may incur significant costs depending on the volume of security checks and findings processed. Additionally, AWS Config, which is required for security checks, is priced separately.
Complexity of Integration: Integrating Security Hub with existing security tools and workflows can be complex, especially for organisations with a diverse set of security solutions.
Regional Limitations: Security Hub is a regional service, which means that findings must be aggregated across regions manually, potentially complicating global security management.
In summary, AWS Security Hub is a powerful tool for managing cloud security, offering automation, integration, and comprehensive insights. However, as with any cloud solution, enterprises should weigh the costs and integration challenges against the benefits it provides. Using it across multiple platforms could introduce some challenges.
For more information, check out the links below. If you want to discuss how Security Hub can help your business, contact us at info@defendedsolution.com.
https://aws.amazon.com/security-hub/features/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/securityhub/latest/userguide/what-is-securityhub.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/smc/latest/ag/sn-config-security-hub.html
