How to use Vanta and AWS to manage vulnerabilities

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.

‍

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. 

‍

In this model, AWS secures the physical infrastructure, the facilities, control plane, and the building blocks while customers must secure the workloads, instances, storage buckets, access, 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. 

‍

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 vulnerability management and how Vanta can make managing these vulnerabilities even easier. 

‍

{{cta_withimage10="/cta-modules"}}

‍

Understanding vulnerability management in AWS

Vulnerability management is an important aspect of your cloud security as it is the process of identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities within your systems and controls to prevent a data breach. Because there are so many potential avenues and methods bad actors could use to gain access to your systems, managing your vulnerabilities can be a difficult task. 

‍

AWS offers tools, like Amazon Inspector, to make vulnerability management easier. Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across all accounts in your organization. It helps you discover all the surfaces where you may have vulnerabilities and reports those vulnerabilities back to you. Once started, it automatically discovers EC2 instances and container images resigned in ECR and AWS Lambda functions at scale and immediately starts assessing them for known vulnerabilities. 

‍

Amazon Inspector calculates a highly contextualized risk score for each finding by correlating common vulnerability and exposure CVE information with factors such as network access and exploitability. The score is used to prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities to improve remediation response efficiency. All findings are aggregated in the Amazon Inspector console and pushed to the security hub and Amazon EventBridge to automate the workflow. Vulnerabilities found in the container images are also sent to the ECR for resource owners to view and remediate. 

‍

How Vanta can help with secrets management 

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:

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

‍

By using Vanta and AWS together, you can more effectively manage your vulnerabilities. Use Amazon Inspector to identify your vulnerabilities and ingest them into Vanta’s user-friendly UI to manage and mitigate them. Vanta enables you to set ownership and SLAs that match the commitments your team has made and helps you track those remediations through completion. This makes it easy for you to prove you're meeting your external obligations and gives you the peace of mind knowing that you're managing your vulnerabilities appropriately. 

‍

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

‍

{{cta_withimage6="/cta-modules"}}

‍