AWS partners with Cisco to secure the cloud

AWS is working closely with Cisco to help mutual customers securely run applications, workloads and data in the AWS Cloud. 

The latest figures from Synergy Research indicate that AWS continues to dominate the cloud with around 33% of the global market. It’s no surprise, therefore, that other leading technology companies are keen to partner with it.

One such company is Cisco and it has recently been outlining how it has developed a close relationship with AWS that benefits their mutual customers, particularly in the area of security.

Cisco is an Advanced Technology Partner (ATP) of AWS and the collaboration has helped joint customers securely deploy, connect and monitor applications across private data centres and AWS.

AWS deploys a shared responsibility security model, where it takes responsibility for the security of the underlying cloud infrastructure - compute, storage, database and networking. However, in parallel, AWS customers are responsible for the security of their applications, workloads and data (including network security, identity and access controls, data encryption and the operating system) while running in the AWS cloud. This is where Cisco looks to provide added value.

In order to help AWS customers, Cisco has built a security architecture around what it describes as four key pillars: visibility, segmentation, threat protection, identity and access management:

Visibility: this is all about having a clear overall view of users, devices, networks, applications, workloads and processes running in the AWS cloud. Cisco products providing these capabilities include:

• Cisco Tetration agents running on AWS instances forward ‘network flow and process information’ that is essential to visibility and policy enforcement, which in turn enables enhanced automated threat defence
• Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud (SWC) consumes Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs, cloud trail, AWS Inspector, AWS IAM and other data sources

Segmentation: here the focus is on reducing the attack surface. To accomplish this, the Cisco products running on AWS include:

• Cisco Next-Generation Firewall (NGFWv) provides capabilities like stateful firewall, ‘application visibility and control’, URL-filtering, and network AMP in AWS
• Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Virtual (ASAv) offers a stateful firewall, network segmentation and VPN capabilities in AWS VPC

Working with Cisco products, AWS security architecture in this area includes AWS security group, AWS gateway, AWS VPC and AWS subnets.

Threat protection: this aims to stop breaches by quickly detecting, blocking and responding to attacks before hackers can steal data or disrupt operations, with the key Cisco products being:

• Cisco NGFWv delivers rapid threat inspection to help protect virtual data centres and AWS cloud environments from sophisticated threats
• Cisco Umbrella virtual appliance is available for AWS, with Cisco Umbrella cloud providing a way to configure and enforce DNS layer security for workloads in the cloud
• Cisco Threat Response helps to detect, investigate and take corrective action against cyber threats

AWS security architecture for threat protection also includes AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) which protects against web exploits and AWS Shield which protects against DDoS.

Identity and Access Management (IAM): this assigns robust access control to help ensure appropriate access to technology resources. The key product here is Cisco Duo which provides multi-factor authentication (MFA) service for AWS consoles and applications running on workloads.

Coupled with Cisco DUO is AWS IAM, which enables users to manage access to AWS services and resources securely.

Emphasising the importance of the Cisco collaboration, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2 Networking, AWS said: “As businesses of all sizes continue to build infrastructure in the cloud, they look to us to make it easier for them to operate their hybrid IT environments. This deeper integration between AWS and Cisco’s flagship products does just that. It enables our customers to build infrastructure that can securely and easily extend from their campus and data centre networks to AWS”.