With AWS CloudTrail's ability to capture a vast amount of data using either an All Region, Single Region, or AWS Organization trail, what benefits does this bring to your business, and why is it needed? Well, there are some simple and obvious reasons for this, some of which you would have already thought of yourself, but let’s go through a few to see how AWS CloudTrail is beneficial to your organization.

Using CloudTrail as a security tool is a great way to identify events that have happened that perhaps shouldn’t have.  Being able to search for specific events, such as an unsuccessful sign-in attempt, or perhaps a principal trying to run a restricted API, allows your security teams to find out how these events happened, who initiated them, and then put in preventative measures ensuring that they do not occur again. Analyzing this data can also help to spot weaknesses in your infrastructure allowing your engineers to bolster and reinforce boundaries and operational best practices.

Using the features of CloudTrail Trail, and CloudTrail Lakes you are able to consolidate activity records from more than one region into a single S3 bucket, providing a convenient way to analyze data, allowing you to identify patterns and audit activity at scale using queries.  Being able to bring data together from multiple sources and regions allows your teams to view API activity through a single-pane-of-glass approach, simplifying analysis of the data sets.

CloudTail provides a great way to allow you to gain visibility into your AWS cloud environment, allowing you to understand exactly what is happening, and when, and by whom.  Having enhanced visibility of your environment provides an opportunity to increase your awareness of attacks, and can provide an early warning to unusual behavior.  In fact, CloudTrail has an interesting feature called CloudTrail Insights which helps to track and identify any unusual behavior detected within your account based on the action of a Write API.  

These events are only captured based upon the behavior pattern of API calls that fall outside the realms of your normal operations.  To help you ascertain the reason behind the insight that has been triggered, additional metadata is also captured. 

CloudTrail Insights is not enabled by default, however, when it is enabled CloudTrail will review, monitor and advise about irregularities in Write management events.  When captured, these events are then stored in a different folder within your destination trail bucket, this folder will be named as /CloudTrail-Insight.  To help you review these insights quickly and effectively, they are also viewable from within the AWS management console of the AWS CloudTrail dashboard.

As AWS CloudTrail is designed to track API calls, it can be used as a very effective method of maintaining a recorded audit of actions and configuration changes taken against your AWS resources across multiple accounts and multiple regions.  The data collected from CloudTrail logs can be used to help you maintain governance and meet regulatory requirements.  From an auditing perspective, each event recorded captures information pertaining to:

• The principal who carried out the API, including the ARN

• The Account ID

• The username and session information

• The time of the event

• The source

• The eventname (API)

• The Region

• Source IP address

• And many more