How to Bolster your AWS Security
By Blair Corbett and Shawn Jiang

Four steps to overcome cybersecurity challenges and protect your company

Your fast-growing SaaS company needs to focus on the biggest drivers of growth – your product and customer base. Understandably, managing your cloud security posture can take a back seat to more immediate business priorities. The problem is that weak security configurations can lead to data breaches. Data breaches lead to unhappy customers and can result in significant financial losses. That not only slows you down but also threatens to derail your success altogether.

In this blog, I’ll show you how you can improve your security posture and focus on those all-important growth tasks – without worrying about imminent security threats.

It all starts with regulatory compliance

For many SaaS companies, ISO 27001 is the gold standard in data security. However, it comes with some hurdles. You need to configure and prove that you’re compliant in your cloud-based environments and internal business processes – which can be expensive. Some companies are so focused on their product, customers, and people that the state of their resource security is neglected - and you can’t protect what you don’t know about. In both instances, where internal processes and procedures may still be in their infancy, security posture is a good first line of defence.

AWS provides a range of compliance certifications and services to help you achieve and maintain regulatory compliance. For example, AWS Security Hub enables you to monitor and manage your security and compliance posture across your AWS environment. One of its key features is the ability to perform compliance checks against various industry standards, including Center for Internet Security (CIS), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

A breakdown of SaaS security posture

Security posture refers to your overall status of cybersecurity readiness. It requires a thorough understanding of all the systems and processes you need to safeguard to create a security roadmap and address potential gaps.

Here’s what it measures:

• Level of asset inventory and attack surface visibility
• Control measures to protect your business from cyber-attacks
• Capabilities to detect and contain attacks and react and recover from security events.

 Four steps for improving SaaS security posture

To optimise your security posture, you need to:

• Analyse your current security posture
• Identify possible gaps
• Take action to eliminate those gaps
• Repeat to strengthen your security posture continuously
• Your resources, people and tech stack are constantly changing. The key goal is to regularly review the state of your security, report on issues and ensure that they’re being addressed in a timely fashion to reduce your level of risk.

It’s usually cheaper to mitigate risk than to let it bubble away and eventually get attacked. You could lose a lot of customer data and, even more detrimental, destroy your reputation.

Key metric: what's your Secure Score?

Secure Score measures your organisation's security posture, with a higher number indicating more improvement actions taken. When used alongside with other AWS Security services, it gives you a birds-eye-view of your cybersecurity preparedness, where the risks are and what you need to do to improve your metric score.

Most customers come into the service with a Secure Score of around 30-40%. Within three to six months, we’d expect to see their level of risk dramatically reduce and a Secure Score improve to 80%+.

Once you’ve reached that point, you can drop your security posture reporting from monthly to bi-monthly or quarterly, with the peace of mind of knowing you have visibility and an ongoing assessment of security vulnerabilities.

Regular review and optimisation = strong security posture

In our experience, customers willing to address security issues quickly get the best security posture results. You might not have the in-house expertise or available financial resource to assess your security posture internally constantly, and that’s where the Parallo team can add value. We help you extract the information you need to create processes and plans to mitigate risks. That way, you can focus on what’s important – your product, not your platform.

To learn more about our Security Posture Reporting or Managed Services for AWS reach out to our team today.