How to use Vanta and AWS for logging, monitoring, and IDS

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, control plane, 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 help you secure the portions of your cloud environment that AWS customers are responsible for. For this post, we’ll cover the tooling AWS offers for logging, monitoring, and IDS and how Vanta can support. 

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Logging, monitoring, and IDS in AWS

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts. It looks at EC2 workloads, container applications S3 buckets and it combines machine learning, anomaly detection, network monitoring, and malicious file discovery using AWS and industry-leading, third-party sources to help protect those workloads and data. It can analyze tens of billions of events across AWS data sources, such as CloudTrail or VPC flow logs.

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CloudTrail is an AWS service that helps you enable logging for operational and risk auditing, governance and compliance of your AWS account. Actions taken by a user role or an AWS service are recorded as events in CloudTrail events include actions taken in the management console, the CLI SDKs, and APIs and it's already active in your account as soon as you sign up. However, it only stores events for the past 90 days without any type of configuration. 

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Amazon CloudWatch monitors your AWS resources and applications that you run on AWS in real-time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics which are variables that you measure your resources and applications with CloudWatch and can gain system-wide visibility into resources, utilization, application performance, and operational health.

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How Vanta can help with logging, monitoring, and IDS

Vanta integrates with various AWS products to help you automate management of your cloud security posture. Some of these areas of your AWS cloud security that Vanta can help with:

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

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Logging and monitoring play a critical role in maintaining a secure environment and providing you with the ability to know what’s going on in your environment if something is not operating as you expect. In a modern enterprise security teams are managing a ton of data in these logs. 

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Vanta can help you ensure that you have logging enabled and configured in accordance with your requirements and set up alerts when necessary so that you can find the data that you need to make effective security decisions without having to comb through terabytes of logs. 

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