Amazon never fails to disappoint its users in terms of security, as it provides different tools and services for data protection. However, switching between different services to enhance security makes it annoying. This is where Amazon comes up with another service AWS Security Hub that reduces the need to collect and prioritize security finding across multiple accounts from integrated Amazon services and its partner products, eliminating the need for time-consuming data processing.
Let's see what it has to offer in terms of security.
Security Hub is an AWS service for cloud security posture management that provides users visibility into their AWS security posture and helps them evaluate their environment for security best practices and industry standards, such as PCI-DSS and CIS.
It collects data from various AWS accounts and services, including AWS GuardDuty, Inspector, IAM Access Analyzer, and supported partner products to manage, aggregate, and prioritize security alerts and findings. The service enables you to analyze your security controls and trends and identify the highest priority issues based on the security findings.
How Does It work?
AWS Security Hub works by performing security best practices checks, aggregating alerts, and enabling automated remediation.
You can use it in the following ways:
Security Hub Console
You have to sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Security Hub console here.
Security Hub API
For accessing Security Hub programmatically, you can use the Security Hub API. It will enable you to issue HTTPS requests to the service. Learn more here.
Once you have enabled the Security Hub, the service will start to consume, aggregate, organize, and prioritize security finding from other AWS services enabled, for instance, Amazon Inspector, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Macie.
It also allows you to enable integrations with Amazon partner security products. Security Hub can also receive findings from those third-party products.
Furthermore, Security Hub also creates its finding by running continuous and automated security checks. It will then correlate and consolidate findings across providers, enabling you to prioritize risks based on the most significant findings.
Reasons for Using Security Hub
AWS Security Hub automatically detects deviations from security practices and aggregates security reports in a standardized format. Some use cases of Security Hub include.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Security Hub helps minimize security risks with its automated checks based on the security controls curated by experts. Also, it simplifies CSPM with built-in mapping capabilities for common compliance standards, including PCI DSS, CIS, and more.
Initiation of Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR )Workflows
The service automatically features security findings, mitigates risk, or sends alerts to ticketing systems with Security Hub's integration with EventBridge.
Automatic Security Scanning
Security Hub enables automatic security scanning of your AWS environment against multiple security standards to discover configuration errors, aggregate accounts, and multi-cloud security checks to provide visibility into your security status.
Gaining Security Insights
The service helps users prioritize the response and remediation tasks of their security teams by enabling search and aggregation of various security findings by resources and accounts.
Benefits of AWS Security Hub
Users can benefit from AWS security Hub in the following ways.
- Reduces effort and time to collect and prioritize findings: It minimizes the efforts to collect and prioritize security findings from multiple AWS services and its partner products by processing findings using the standard finding format, which automates the management of data. After that, the findings from providers are correlated to help users prioritize the important ones.
- Automatic security checks: Security Hub runs automatic and continuous security checks based on security best practices and industry standards. It then provides a score and discovers the account requiring specific attention.
- Consolidated insights into findings: The service combines the finding across multiple accounts and products and shows the results in the Security Hub Console.
- Automated findings remediation: Since you can integrate Security Hub with AWS EventBridge, you can automate findings' remediations by defining custom actions whenever you receive a finding.
How to Use AWS Security Hub?
Using Security Hub is not a difficult task. Follow these steps to get started with Amazon Security Hub.
Step 1_AWS Console Login
To begin with, log in to the AWS console and select AWS Security Hub from the console.
Step 2_One Click Deployment
- With a single API call or one click in the AWS Security Hub console, enable it for a single account.
- With multiple clicks on the console, enable it for multiple accounts.
The services will automatically start aggregating findings once enabled.
Step3 _ Managing Security Alerts
Experience Security Hub with a 30-day free trial without any extra charges and manage your security alerts from the console.
Important New Feature: How to Use Security Hub with Control Tower.
Here we are talking about an important new feature of AWS Security Hub that now can be integrated with AWS Control Tower.
What is AWS Control Tower?
AWS Control Tower is a centralized management service offered by AWS that automates the creation and governance of AWS multi-account architecture for each new account, followed by best practices for operations, security, and compliance.
The new features will enable users to combine Security Hub detective controls with Control Tower's preventive and proactive controls that can be managed using the Control Tower.
Thanks to Security Hub controls integration with related control objectives in the Control Tower control library, this feature will provide users with holistic insights and a view of the controls needed to meet particular control objectives.
It will benefit users in the following ways.
- Provide a strong baseline of compliance governance and controls needed to scale your business with Amazon services and workloads.
- Help monitor the security of the AWS multi-cloud environment.
How to Use Security Hub with Control Tower?
Follow these steps to enable Security Hub controls in Control Tower.
- Go to AWS Control Tower's control library.
- Select any control originating from Security Hub, and enable it.
The control will be activated. This way a new Service-Managed Standard will be created by Control Tower within Security Hub.
Conclusion
AWS Security Hub is a one-stop service for your cloud security management, as it provides users with a centralized dashboard for a security readiness score and alerts. It manages and aggregates findings from other AWS services and partner products, enabling you to benefit from an automated ongoing security assessment of your AWS accounts.
