How AWS Assessment Services Can Help You Understand Your AWS Deployment and Architecture

Steve Rastall (Founder & CEO) 12-Sep-2022 09:45:00

News

AWS offers a suite of assessment services that can help you understand your AWS deployment and architecture. The services use EC2 instances (Virtual machines) to collect data about your AWS deployment and generate reports with guidance about how to improve your architecture or improve security, or reduce cost.

Below we describe the different AWS assessment services and how they can potentially help you improve your AWS deployment.

AWS provides several different assessment services to help customers understand their current environment and identify opportunities for improvement. The AWS Trusted Advisor provides a comprehensive health check for your AWS environment, identifying potential problems and recommending solutions.

The AWS Health Check service assesses your environment for compliance with security best practices and offers recommendations for improvement. The AWS Security Benchmark tool evaluates your environment against the latest security best practices and identifies gaps in your security posture.

The advantages of using AWS assessment services include the following:

1. Comprehensive assessments of your environment that identify potential issues and recommend solutions.

AWS assessment services review your AWS environment and can help you identify potential problems early on.

Using AWS assessment services has several benefits and can help you improve the security, performance, and stability of your AWS deployment. By taking advantage of these services, you can avoid common mistakes and optimize your AWS environment for success, CloudOps automates this process.

2. Evaluation of your environment against the latest security best practice to identify weaknesses.

By looking at weaknesses on a regular basis, you can take steps to mitigate potential risks and improve your response to threats.

Maintaining a secure cloud infrastructure requires regular assessment of the environment to identify any changes or vulnerabilities that could lead to data loss.

AWS provides comprehensive security audits for this purpose, so you know your deployment is up-to-date with modern best practices and imminent threats, in order to maintain its integrity throughout various operations such as business growth without compromising customer privacy. Again CloudOps can automate the security checks, patching, PEN testing, vulnerability scans, and monitoring and closing off attacks in real time.

3. Identification of opportunities for improvement in your AWS deployment.

AWS assessment services can help you identify opportunities for improvement in your AWS deployment. By taking advantage of these recommendations, you can tune your environment for better performance, stability, and almost always reduce your monthly cost.

Some of the potential problems that AWS customers could experience include:

Not being able to take advantage of certain AWS features

Poorly configured services
Overspending on AWS resources
Not having the proper monitoring or logging in place

All of this can mean that the deployment does not behave as expected or costs a lot more than expected.

Not being able to optimise your usage of AWS resources

If you're new to the cloud, not being able to optimise your AWS resources can be a huge issue. You can quickly rack up bills without getting any return if you over size machines or resources.

This can lead management to see the AWS cloud as unsustainable if the monthly OpEx cost just keeps going up, compared with the stable on-premise / data centre cost.

These are the basic steps you can take to ensure you are getting value for money:

Understand the basics of how AWS pricing works
Identify which resources are being underutilised and remove or scale them back
Monitor usage on a regular basis to ensure that spend is within budget

By taking these steps, you can improve your own knowledge and make the most of your AWS deployments.

Not being aware of potential security risks

One of the biggest risks is that customers expect AWS to automate more security than it does. They expect things like patching and updates to be automatic out of the box, rather than needing to be set up, monitored and maintained.

AWS does provide security services but each of these needs to be turned on and set up, they also each come with additional costs. If customers are not aware of this and don't set up these processes then this creates more and more risk over time.

The three main areas which are exploited are:

Lack of patching
Firewalls not turned on
Random ports left open and not monitored
AWS user accounts being hacked (Lack of 2 factor)

It's important to get the basics taken care of and all of the areas above are basic IT security considerations.

An AWS assessment can help identify problems and fixes

AWS and partner tools like CloudOps provide a number of assessment services ongoing to help customers identify these potential problems and take corrective action automatically. This gives you a set of clear steps to take for each recommendation made.

If you want to improve your AWS deployment, then CloudOps could be the most efficient option. Book a test drive to find out how we can help.