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Why context is the critical component for better security outcomes from AWS

Editorial team

26 November 2024

If you’re a security professional in 2024, there’s a good chance that you have experience working in AWS. After all, AWS commands 31% of the total share of the cloud infrastructure market. No matter its prevalence, however, most security teams don’t just work in AWS. They handle a whole range of situations spanning multiple environments and applications in a standard day.

This state of affairs isn’t perfect. It leaves security teams handling lots of noise and struggling to generate insight from it. They badly need context to understand what their applications and environments are saying about the overall state of security.

The good news is that advances and standardisation of APIs make it perfectly possible to establish this context. A-Ops serves this purpose as a platform that drives better outcomes from the entire security stack.

Integration paired with functionality

A-Ops integrates all IT assets with automation into one platform. Critically, A-Ops is built for security professionals, by security professionals. We know how to get the best security outcomes out of AWS and the platform is designed to generate them.

This starts right out of the box. We offer simple template workflows that integrate with AWS and other critical applications to serve helpful purposes:

  • Correlation of events: analyse the relationship between security events across the whole IT environment to identify underlying causes and potential solutions
  • Ingestion of events: automate the process of collecting, processing and storing event data in a resource-effective manner
  • Asset collection: facilitates the automated integration of an organisation’s entire asset database into A-Ops for continuous monitoring without compromising on privacy
  • Monitoring and dashboarding: helps to make sense of all this data with central, automated monitoring functions and dashboarding that’s truly holistic

These workflows automate the flow of data from AWS into A-Ops along with applications, shedding overall light on a security footprint. It also brings context with a totally unique data fabric. With OpenSearch – AWS’ open-source family of data search and analytics software – users can build automated workflows that run OpenSearch queries with their own data logs. This informs critical functions like risk scoring and hostname detection with security community knowledge.

Our TemplateAI feature also means users can generate components of a workflow from a text prompt with their desired objectives. A simple prompt to “find EC2 incidents with public IP addresses” presents a workflow that does just this, making subsequent follow-up action much simpler; whether that’s applying antivirus software or identifying risky security gaps

Outcomes that lift all boats

Working with context results in better security outcomes from AWS. Put it this way; an alert from AWS Security Hub could recommend a drastic action like shutting down a server in response to a security event. Security teams shouldn’t settle for anything less than a high level of confidence before taking such a step. And that confidence can only be based on context drawn from data-driven automation that integrates the security stack.