Let’s Secure Backups in AWS
AWS and customers both share responsibilities for security. Because security procedures develop to address new threats, it’s critical to undertake regular risk assessments to establish the relevance of security controls and to install several layers of controls to protect data.
Let’s secure backup’s in AWS with few steps and configurations:
Setup a backup strategy
A robust backup strategy is an important aspect of an organization’s data protection plan for surviving, recovering from, and minimizing the effect of a security event. When creating a thorough data backup and restoration plan, start by identifying probable disruptions and their potential business effect. The goal of a backup strategy is to provide a recovery plan that restores or eliminates downtime while staying within the accepted recovery objectives of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Backup should be part of the disaster recovery and business continuity plans
Disaster recovery (DR) is the process of planning for, responding to, and recovering from a disaster. The DR plan, which is a crucial component of your resiliency strategy, addresses how your workload adapts when a crisis occurs. A disaster might be caused by a technological failure, a human action, or a natural event. The Company Continuity Plan (BCP) describes how an organization expects to maintain normal business operations in the event of an unanticipated disruption.
Let’s automate the backup
Backup plans and resource allocations for a company should be set up to suit company’s data security policy. You may standardize and expand your backup approach by automating and implementing backup rules or organization-wide backup plans. By scheduling backup operations, you may use AWS Organizations to centrally automate backup rules to install, configure, monitor, and regulate backup activities across supported AWS Backup resources.
When automating backup processes, you may extend resource assignment choices by leveraging AWS tags and resource IDs to automatically identify the AWS resources that contain data for your business critical apps and safeguard your data with immutable backups. This can assist you in prioritizing security controls such as access permissions and backup plans or policies.
Access control techniques should be implemented
When it comes to cloud security, you should start with a solid identity foundation to guarantee that users have the appropriate rights to access data. Appropriate authentication and authorization can help to reduce the likelihood of security incidents. AWS users must create access control rules as part of the shared responsibility model. You may use AWS Identity and Access Management to establish and manage access policies at scale.
Use IAM Access Analyzer to identify any AWS Backup IAM role shared with the following to reduce security concerns such as unintentional access to your backup resources and data:
Encrypt Backup Data
Encrypt data in transit as well as at rest. To safeguard data in transit, AWS utilizes public API calls to access AWS Backup over the network, encrypting communication between you, your application, and the AWS Backup service using the TLS protocol. You may use AWS CloudHSM or the cloud-native AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to safeguard data at rest. AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security model (HSM) that encrypts data using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with 256-bit keys (AES-256), a powerful industry-accepted method. Examine your data governance and regulatory needs before choosing an encryption solution to encrypt your cloud data and backup vaults.
Immutable storage protects backups
Immutable storage provides a cost-effective way to deal with possible security incidents that might have a substantial impact on company’s operations. AWS Backup Vault Lock assures immutability and adds an extra layer of protection to your backup vaults’ backups (recovery points). This is especially beneficial in highly regulated businesses with severe backup and archive integrity requirements. AWS Backup Vault Lock ensures that your data is protected, as well as a backup from which you may recover in the event of accidental or malicious activity.
Monitoring and alerting for backups should be implemented
It is possible for backup jobs to fail. A failed job, such as a backup, restore, or copy operation, may have an influence on the process’s succeeding phases. When the initial backup job fails, there’s a good chance that all subsequent tasks will fail as well. Monitoring and notification are the greatest ways to comprehend the course of events in this situation. Monitoring and alerting for backup tasks can help you respond to backup failures by providing organizational awareness.
Examine your backup configuration
AWS Backup Audit Manager includes built-in, customizable compliance controls that meet your organization’s compliance and regulatory requirements. Audit the compliance of AWS Backup rules against set controls such as defined backup frequency to ensure that the backup program is working as it should and to discover and fix any abnormalities from backup operations. Continuously and automatically track your backup activities and produce automated reports to locate and examine backup procedures or resources that do not meet your business needs.
Test your recovery capabilities
Testing your backups should be part of your backup plan. If backed-up data cannot be recovered, a backup plan is ineffective. Test your ability to locate and restore specific recovery points on a regular basis. You may begin your data recovery strategy by creating data recovery patterns and then testing them on a regular basis. Create a simple, repeatable strategy for undertaking continuous data recovery testing to boost your confidence in your capacity to restore backup data.
Make backup a part of your incident-response strategy
AWS Backup may be used to create automatic instance-level backups in the form of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and volume-level backups in the form of snapshots across various AWS accounts. This can aid your incident response team’s forensic operations, such as automated forensic disc collection, by providing a restore point that can assist mitigate the breadth and effect of possible security incidents like ransomware.
Please contact piyush.jalan93@gmail.com if you have any questions on AWS backup’s security and stay tuned for the upcoming write-up.
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