Because, in conformance with their Shared Responsibility Model, AWS does such a good job protecting their physical infrastructure, many of the kinds of data theft that plague locally-hosted operations aren’t likely to threaten your cloud-based servers.
But not so fast with the smug grin: this definitely doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Not even close. After all, the kind of disaster that recently hit Morgan Stanley – and 350,000 of its customers – could just as easily have happened on an AWS-hosted system. Data theft (sometimes called “data exfiltration”) is a serious threat to all networked systems, and you’ve got responsibilities to your customers, investors, and society at large to do your part to prevent it.
Here’s a checklist of steps you can – and should – take to both harden your deployment and, in general, tighten the way you interact with your cloud resources:
Besides those more integrated approaches, there’s also Data Leak Prevention (DLP) technology, an entire class of software solutions aimed at data theft protection. DLP systems use machine learning heuristics, user activity monitoring, and sometimes honeypots to monitor a network.
They’ll particularly focus on analyzing data when it’s in motion (network), at rest (archived), and in use (endpoints). Should you feel the need is pressing enough, there’s no reason you can’t install such a package on part of your cloud infrastructure to keep watch over your account resources.
Of course, DLP systems are available from many of the usual suspects like Symantic and McAfee. But it’s the Linux-based open source packages, MyDLP and, perhaps, OpenDLP that should interest us the most because they’re likely to be flexible (and Linux-friendly) enough to fit comfortably into the AWS environment.
The bottom line? The tools we’ll need to defend our cloud deployments against data theft are available. We’ve just got to decide to use them.
It's Flash Sale time! Get 50% off your first year with Cloud Academy: all access to AWS, Azure, and Cloud…
In this blog post, we're going to answer some questions you might have about the new AWS Certified Data Engineer…
This is my 3rd and final post of this series ‘Navigating the Vocabulary of Gen AI’. If you would like…