As enterprises map out their Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud journey, security and compliance are emerging as key levers for modernization, enabling infrastructure and applications to be refashioned to bolster the overall security posture while mitigating business risks.
Security and compliance remain top priorities as escalating cybersecurity attacks and the shift to cloud unlock more, and more varied, attack opportunities. Spending on cloud security solutions continues to grow, with Gartner having forecast a 24% increase in 2024. Modernizing data, applications, and infrastructure in the cloud is viewed as a way to improve security and governance, cited by 34% of the respondents to Foundry’s Cloud Computing Study 2024.
In fact, modernizing the IT estate in the AWS cloud ups the ante, delivering a rich portfolio of advanced security capabilities, including encryption, access controls, continuous monitoring, automated threat detection, centralized visibility, and protection of distributed data stores. This broad security footprint is especially relevant as momentum for artificial intelligence (AI) workflows builds, requiring the scalability, flexibility, and high-performance computing horsepower of the AWS cloud.
“AWS offers numerous managed services that integrate well with each other, which makes replicating the same set of features on-premises more difficult,” says Chris Gebhardt, chief information security officer (CISO) at nClouds. For example, capabilities such as managed keys for encryption delivered through Key Management Service (KMS) or the aggregated view of AWS account compliance possible with Security Hub and GuardDuty are difficult to implement in traditional on-premises deployments. “By prioritizing security improvements early on, the cost to implement them is much easier.”
AWS and its critical network partners also have trained and certified resources in industry-standard compliance laws and frameworks such as FedRAMP 20X, CMMC, NIST 171, HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC-2. Adherence is critically important for companies in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
nClouds raises the cloud security and compliance bar
As a Security Competency partner, nClouds works across industries to achieve a greater level of security and compliance within AWS. nClouds’ extensive expertise in cloud operations, security frameworks, and the AWS ecosystem helps healthcare, life sciences, financial services, and GovCloud customers seamlessly integrate advanced compliance and security measures into operations, decreasing time to compliance.
nClouds’ modernization approach encompasses:
- Net zero-cost well-architected review framework (WAFR): Using advanced tooling and processes, nClouds performs a WAFR to evaluate and remediate high-risk issues with AWS infrastructure, including identifying immediate security and compliance issues that have an impact down the road.
- Containerization and serverless capability: In modernization, applications are frequently broken up into services that can be containerized or moved to serverless platforms. In doing so, new opportunities are created to improve security posture, including software library scanning, common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) scanning of images, and integrated headless security testing into continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
- Data modernization: Modernized data stores provide a path to leveraging more advanced security patterns. For example, permissions can be granted only when a consumer needs access to the data or the data can be isolated by discrete roles.
- Securing software supply chains: Integrating supply chain security scans within a CI/CD pipeline is crucial for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities throughout the software development life cycle. These scans help ensure the integrity and security of the software being built and deployed, offering early vulnerability protection and safeguarding against potential attacks that could compromise the supply chain.
- Operationalization: Postmigration, nClouds can provide ongoing operational assistance to ensure that the necessary security skills are internalized by the customer. This includes monthly recurring security information and event management/security operations center ( SIEM/SOC) operations evaluations as well as fractional CISO and chief technology officer (CTO) services to assist customers in selecting and customizing the right tools.
nClouds infuses AWS modernization workflows with the highest levels of attention to security and compliance, resulting in an IT landscape primed for innovation without the threat of security breaches or disruption.