How to protect your physical infrastructure with AWS and Vanta

‍This blog is part of a series about how to use Vanta and AWS to simplify your organization’s cloud security. To learn more about how to use Vanta and AWS, watch our Coffee and Compliance on-demand webinar.

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Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is one of the most popular cloud providers for organizations today — providing one of the most flexible and secure cloud environments available. When it comes to security, AWS has what’s called a Shared Responsibility Model meaning that AWS handles the security of the cloud itself while its customers are responsible for securing what they deploy to their cloud environment. 

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In this model, AWS secures the physical infrastructure, the facilities, computing, and the building blocks while customers must secure the workloads and applications that they deploy to the cloud. This is where the AWS integration with Vanta makes a huge difference in how you secure and manage your cloud deployments. 

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In this blog series, we’ll show you how to use Vanta to secure the portions of your cloud environment that AWS customers are responsible for. In this blog, we’ll cover physical and environmental infrastructure, explaining what AWS does to protect the cloud data centers that store your data and what other aspects of physical security you’re responsible for that Vanta can help with. 

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How AWS protects your physical infrastructure

AWS does the heavy-lifting when it comes to protecting the physical infrastructure of your cloud. With a cloud provider, customers essentially rent the virtual space and infrastructure within a region or availability zone, behind which are the physical data centers. In this model, customers inherit the full suite of security measures which they can leverage for their own security compliance. This reduces the investment and provides your business with flexible options for usage, resources, availability, and redundancy.

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AWS employs the same security isolations that are employed in traditional data centers for each regional data center around the world, providing more security policing and countermeasures than almost any large company could afford themselves. 

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Here are some of the security measures AWS has in place to protect its infrastructure:  

• Access to data centers is on a need-to-know basis and is regularly reviewed
• Security guards and CCTV on site
• Multi-factor authentication for access to buildings
• Intrusion detection systems, access log monitoring, and alarms
• 24/7 monitoring, triage, and incident response 
• Separations of networks and isolation of hardware and storage
• Environmental monitoring 

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AWS has achieved and maintained several industry-recognized frameworks, such as SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3. AWS makes its compliance reports regularly available through the AWS Artifact console. You can also request a third-party audit if needed.

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What aspects of physical security are you responsible for? 

While AWS customers inherit a lot of protections from AWS, there are still some aspects of physical security that you’re responsible for, such as:

• Securing offices and other facilities: Put protections in place to limit access to your office spaces or other facilities that house your data, devices, or systems. 
• Protecting your devices: Any compromised device connected to your network could result in a data breach. Implement measures, like device encryption, timeout, multi-factor authentication and strong passwords, to protect your devices from unauthorized access. 
• Remote work security: The organization should consider the physical working conditions of any remote workers and ensure that physical threats to those workspaces are considered and managed. Relevant controls may include, technical monitoring and endpoint controls, rules and policies, spot checks and audits of remote networks, and training for staff.
• Managing vendor risk: As part of the compliance process for many frameworks, you need to do your due diligence on third-party vendors. You’ll need to show your auditor that you have a process for evaluating AWS in addition to the other lesser-known vendors you use.

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How Vanta can help you protect your physical infrastructure

For the areas that are your responsibility, Vanta can help you easily protect these aspects of your infrastructure. Vanta can help you establish policies for your physical spaces, device, and vendor risk management. The platform scans your infrastructure to identify the security gaps you need to address and run tests for physical security outside of the data center. Vanta’s Vendor Risk Management solution lets you automate vendor discovery, risk assessment, and remediation so you can streamline vendor reviews. 

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In addition to helping with these areas, Vanta integrates with various AWS products to help you automate security. Some of these areas include:

• Identity and access management
• Vulnerability assessment
• Continuous monitoring of the environment
• Remediation alerts
• Compliance reports for common standards

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To learn more about how to use Vanta and AWS, watch our Coffee and Compliance webinar recording.

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