What is Securing a multi-account AWS environment?

Securing a multi-account AWS environment is a critical aspect of cloud engineering services as it helps ensure the safety and privacy of the data and resources hosted on AWS. A multi-account environment refers to the use of multiple AWS accounts to isolate different environments, such as development, testing, and production, to reduce the risk of accidental resource modification or deletion.

Securing a multi-account AWS environment involves implementing various security controls, such as:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM) – Implementing IAM best practices, such as the principle of least privilege, to limit access to AWS resources to only authorized users and services.

• Network Security – Implementing network security controls such as security groups, network ACLs, and VPCs to control the ingress and egress traffic between resources and the internet.

• Encryption – Using encryption for data at rest and in transit, and implementing AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to manage encryption keys.

• Monitoring and Logging – Implementing a centralized logging and monitoring solution to track and identify any unusual activities and events.

• Security Automation – Using AWS security automation tools such as AWS Config, AWS Security Hub, and AWS GuardDuty to detect and remediate security threats in real-time.

• Compliance – Ensuring that the AWS environment is compliant with industry-specific regulations and standards such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR.

By implementing these security controls, a multi-account AWS environment can be better protected against security threats and data breaches, enabling cloud engineering services to operate in a secure and reliable manner.

Also read:  Looking forward to maximizing ROI from Cloud Migration? Here’s how, why and when to do it.

Problem Statement

As a cloud services provider, the top 3 inquiries from large enterprises with workloads running on AWS are:

• How can I secure my multi-account AWS environment?
• How can we make sure that all accounts are complying with compliance and auditing requirements?
• How can we complete this quickly, all at once, rather than in pieces?

Even though large organisations with numerous AWS accounts have guidelines for new AWS implementations, managing and monitoring all the accounts at once is inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to security risks.

Solution

AWS Control Tower is the best solution to provision, manage, govern, and secure a multi-AWS account environment, even though there are more traditional methods of securing AWS environments using AWS IAM, Service Catalog, Config, and AWS Organizations.

Using pre-approved account configurations, Control Tower’s Account factory automates the provisioning of new AWS accounts. A landing zone that is based on best-practices blueprints is automatically created by the control tower, and guardrails are used to enable governance. The landing zone is a multi-account baseline with sound architecture that adheres to the AWS well-architected framework. Guardrails put governance regulations for operations, compliance, and security into effect.

Organizations can use Control Tower to:

• Easily create well-designed multi-account environments; and provide federated access using AWS SSO.
• Use VPC to implement network configurations.
• Create workflows for creating accounts using AWS Service Catalog
• Ensure adherence to guardrails-set rules.
• Detect security vulnerabilities automatically.

Benefits

• Beneficial for continuously growing enterprises, where there will be new additions to AWS accounts progressively.
• Helpful for large businesses with a diverse mix of engineering, operations, and development teams
• Gives a step-by-step process to customise the build and automate the creation of an AWS Landing Zone
• Prevents the use of resources in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s policies.
• Guardrails are a high-level rule in Control Tower’s AWS Config rules and helps detecting non-conformance with previously provisioned resources.
• Provides a dashboard for quick access to provisioned accounts and reports on the detective and preventive guardrails that are activated on your accounts.
• Compliance Reports detailing any resources that violate policies that have been enabled by guardrails.

In conclusion, securing a multi-account AWS environment is crucial for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your organization’s data and resources. By implementing proper security measures such as access controls, monitoring, and automation, you can significantly reduce the risk of security breaches and data loss.

Indium Software’s expertise in AWS security can help organizations to design and implement a comprehensive security strategy that meets their specific needs and requirements. Their team of experts can help with security assessments, audits, and ongoing monitoring to ensure that your AWS environment is continuously protected from security threats.

The post How to Secure an AWS Environment with Multiple Accounts  appeared first on Indium.

Another crucial requirement of clients on SaaS platforms is scalability. There may be peaks and troughs in traffic to the application due to expected and unexpected reasons. A seasonal increase in demand, a promotional campaign, sudden trending of a related topic, and so on can see more click-throughs than before. Being able to scale up when the demand peaks and scale down during low-demand periods is another crucial requirement to serve customers cost-effectively.

Extensibility and scalability are an integral part of the business model and therefore requires the SaaS platform to be able to perform under such extraordinary conditions too.

Must Read: 5 Best Practices While Building a Multi-Tenant SaaS Application using AWS Serverless/AWS EKS

AWS Lambda is one such solution that can help businesses scale based on need, automatically, and allows extensibility.

AWS Lambda Features That Allow Scalability

AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, helps to manage the compute resources needed to run the code in response to events such as updating the code, changes in the state, and so on. It can also be used for extending other AWS services using custom logic or installing customized backend services requiring scalability, performance, and security. This is made possible by Lambda, which runs the code on computing infrastructure that is highly available. It also manages the administration of the compute resources, such as maintaining the server and the operating system, provisioning capacity and scaling automatically, deploying code and security patches, and monitoring and logging code.

Using Custom Logic to Extend Other AWS Services

As data is ingested and moves through the cloud AWS resources such as Amazon DynamoDB tables and Amazon S3 buckets, the application of custom logic by AWS Lambda enables computing and keeping pace with the incoming requests.

Automatic Scaling

In AWS Lambda, the code is invoked only as per need with automatic scaling to handle the spike in requests without manual intervention and limits. Within a fraction of a second of the event beginning, the code also starts running without compromising performance. Multiple instances of the code can be run due to the code remaining stateless and not needing deployment or configuration.AWS Lambda provides a cost-effective solution for extensibility and scaling as customers pay-per-use.

Check out this article to learn about the cloud on AWS: Cloud Computing On Aws

Provisioned Concurrency

Provisioned Concurrency is a feature of AWS Lambda that enables it to respond quickly to increased demand by initialing functions and keeping them hyper-ready. This feature can be leveraged to implement interactive services on the web and mobile or to access microservices with latency-sensitivity or synchronous APIs.

Scheduled Scaling

Whenever additional workload can be predicted due to an expected increase in traffic, scheduled scaling is also possible. This can be cost-effective by being activated only when required and not at other times. Another option is utilization-based scaling, where provisioned concurrency is increased according to the established utilization metrics. This is useful when demand cannot be predicted.

Customization and Extensibility with AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda’s extensibility and customization capabilities are especially in demand by SaaS customers who have migrated from on-premises solutions. While APIs and integration hooks may address this need, sophisticated customization requires custom code to be integrated with the SaaS workflows for effectiveness.

Therefore, they face challenges such as cost, isolation, and usability. AWS Lambda being serverless, it helps to overcome these challenges by scaling the compute automatically and charging only based on use. It achieves this by abstracting away and simplifying the consumption model. SaaS builders also include controls and features that allow the customization of the execution environments within their own SaaS product. As a result, SaaS owners experience greater flexibility in choosing cost-effective usability and isolation models.

Some of the customers who have successfully enriched their user experience using the extensibility and customization of AWS Lambda for SaaS include Freshworks, Segment Functions, and Netlify Functions.

Read what our AVP of cloud services has to say about the AWS Lambda services: Securing your Serverless Lambda functions

Indium Leveraging AWS Lamba for Scale and Extensibility

Indium Software is a cutting-edge solution provider with a team of AWS specialists who can help businesses migrate/modernize their applications and data on the cloud and

leverage automation to scale. Our team works closely with our customers to understand their needs for scale and extend and develop bespoke solutions to provide cost-effective and scalable solutions. In addition to workload migration and new app development on the cloud, we also help with converting monolithic applications to microservices and leverage containerization and serverless solutions such as AWS Lambda. Be it scheduled scaling or automatic scaling, Indium can tailor the right solution to keep your business agile and responsive, increase customer satisfaction, and break barriers to innovation.

The post AWS Lambda to Extend and Scale Your SaaS Application appeared first on Indium.

The emergence of the PC, which made owning a computer much cheaper, and subsequently the rise of corporate data centres, which allowed organisations to store massive amounts of data, completely eclipsed these ‘time-sharing’ services.

However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of renting access to computer power reappeared in the form of application service providers, utility computing, and grid computing. Following that, it gained traction with the introduction of software as a service (SaaS) and evolution of hyperscale cloud computing companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

With increasing cloud adoption, cloud computing-as-a-service is now fast emerging. Coming with several excellent features, Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a leader in cloud computing as a service. This blog explains in detail, as to why businesses should implement AWS cloud computing services.

What is Cloud Computing?

The provision and delivery of numerous services over the Internet is known as cloud computing. These resources include servers, databases software applications etc.

Cloud-based storing allows you to save files to a remote database rather than maintaining them on a local storage device. As long as an electronic device has internet access, it has access to the data as well as the software programmes hosted by the cloud. So, the user need not be at a specific location to access data or applications, which offers them seamless flexibility to work remotely.

For a variety of reasons, including cost savings, productivity, speed, performance, efficiency, and security, thus, cloud computing is being increasingly preferred by enterprises. It has grown in popularity as a result of significant advancements in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as greater access to high-speed internet.

Because the data being accessed is situated remotely in the cloud or a virtual place, cloud computing is dubbed as such.

Cloud computing offloads all the hard labour associated with crunching and processing data from your device. It also offloads the processing by massive computer clusters located thousands of miles distant in cyberspace.

Cloud computing solutions are available in both public and private versions. For a price, public cloud providers offer their services over the Internet. Private cloud services, on the other hand, cater to a limited number of customers. These services are a network system that provides hosted services. A hybrid option is also available, which includes components of both public and private services.

Cloud computing vs Traditional web hosting

A cloud service is distinguished from traditional web hosting by three main characteristics, which are:

– On-demand access to enormous amounts of computing power is available to users. Typically, it is sold by the minute or by the hour.

– It is adaptable, allowing users to have as much or as little service as they choose at any particular time.

– The provider is in charge of the entire service (the customer needs nothing but a personal computer and access to internet).

Must read: The Future Of Cloud Computing : Things To Look Out For

Cloud computing using AWS

AWS-based cloud computing provides a work advantage to developer and IT teams. It allows them to focus on their core tasks while keeping them away from involving in functional processes such as procurement, capacity planning, inventory management, maintenance etc…

Below are some of the reasons and considerations as to why businesses need to implement cloud computing for enhanced business processes.

• Change your capital investment to variable expense: Instead of investing substantially in data centres and servers before knowing how you’ll use them, you can pay just when you utilise computing resources, and only for how much you use.
• Take advantage of vast economies of scale: Cloud computing allows you to achieve lower variable costs than you could on your own. Since the cloud aggregates the data of hundreds of thousands of consumers, companies like AWS may achieve greater economies of scale, resulting in reduced pay-as-you-go costs.
• Stop speculating about capacity: Stop guessing about your infrastructure capacity requirements. When capacity decisions are made before an application is deployed, you often wind up with either expensive idle resources or constrained capacity. These issues are no longer an issue because to cloud computing. You can use as much capacity as required and scale up or scale down with just a few minutes’ notice.
• Experience increased speed– New IT resources are simply a click away in a cloud computing environment. This means you can cut the time it takes to make such resources available to your developers from weeks to minutes. Because the cost and time it takes to experiment and innovate are greatly reduced, the organization’s agility increases dramatically.
• Shift focus on priority tasks: Stop wasting money on data centres and instead focus on projects that differentiate your company, not infrastructure. Instead of the heavy labour of racking, stacking, and powering servers, cloud computing allows you to focus on your own clients.
• Implement easily to generate fast results: With only a few clicks, you can easily deploy your application in numerous areas throughout the world. This allows you to provide your clients with lower latency and a better experience at a low cost.

Benefits of Cloud Computing on AWS

Simple to use / Easy-to-use

AWS can let application providers and vendors host their applications fast and securely, irrespective of if they are existing or new SaaS-based apps. AWS’s Management Console and well-documented web service APIs easily allows to access AWS application hosting platform.

Flexible

You can choose your operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services on AWS’s platform. Further, AWS provides you with a virtual environment in which you can install the requisite applications and services. This simplifies the migration of existing apps while keeping the ability to create new ones.

Cost-Effective

There are no long-term contracts or upfront obligations, and you just pay for the compute power, storage, and other resources you utilise. The AWS Economics Center has more information on comparing the costs of different hosting options with AWS.

Reliable With AWS, you get access to a scalable, reliable, and secure worldwide computing infrastructure that has been perfected over a decade as the virtual backbone of Amazon`s multibillion-dollar online business.

Performance-driven and scalable

Offering superb features like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, AWS lets you scale up or scale down on order.

You have access to computation and storage resources when you need them, thanks to Amazon’s vast infrastructure.

Secure

To secure and fortify our infrastructure, AWS takes an end-to-end approach that includes physical, operational, and software measures. Visit the AWS Security Center for further information.

Conclusion

As cloud computing has become more widespread, a variety of models and deployment methodologies have arisen to fulfil the needs of various users. Amongst all, AWS offers you varied levels of control and flexibility to manage.

Understand the differences between Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Platform as a Service, as well as various deployment options available. Our experts can assist you in determining which combination of services is most suited to your requirements and guide you in AWS implementation.

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