Cyber attacks pose a persistent threat to both businesses and charities. While government data for 2019 shows that fewer businesses have experienced breaches or attacks this year than in 2018, those organisations who have been targeted tend to suffer a greater number of attacks. That means their infrastructure needs to be built to withstand the tenacity of sustained intrusion attempts.
In the last 12 months, over three in ten businesses and charities have experienced a cyber security breach or attack of some kind. Among these:
- 32% needed new measures to prevent future attacks.
- 32% took up staff time dealing with breaches.
- 21% had staff prevented from carrying out daily work.
- 48% identified at least one breach or attack a month.
Add these operational costs to the average annual cost to an organisation that loses data or assets in a breach – in excess of £4,000 for businesses and a staggering £9,470 for charities – and it becomes clear just how important the security of your organisation’s digital infrastructure really is.
It’s not just a problem for household name companies, either. In 2018, nearly half of all UK small businesses suffered a cyber breach or attack.
Everyone wants to know that their information is secure, and your organisation has legal obligations to keep sensitive data secure. Any lapse in that security will deeply, often irreparably, damage your customers’ trust in you – and you could face severe penalties as a result.
That’s why Amazon Web Services sets out well-defined standards for security best practice in the design and implementation of cloud operations, known as the Well-Architected Framework.
The Second Pillar: Security
Today, security is often the foremost concern of users and businesses alike. GDPR legislation, which came into effect in May 2018, has only increased the demand for secure solutions that retain the trust of your product and service users.
As an Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Partner, Isotoma assists businesses just like yours by evaluating the security of your AWS implementations. Our skilled team will ensure best practice is followed as defined within the Well-Architected Framework.
In doing so, we’ll make sure your organisation meets compliance requirements, keeps data safe, and benefits from an infrastructure designed to remain secure as it scales to meet the growing needs of your business. We’ll use our AWS expertise to help you maintain the highest standard of security, all while saving the time and money spent managing your own facilities.
Arrange Your Free AWS Well-Architected Review
The Well-Architected Programme is funded by Amazon, meaning our review – and up to five days of work spent carrying out our recommendations – are completely free.
If you’ve heard enough and want to arrange your free Well-Architected Review, simply get in touch. Otherwise, read on to learn how our review will help your business achieve improved security standards.
The Design Principles of Security
Our experienced cloud architects will use their knowledge of secure design principles to conduct a comprehensive review that evaluates your implementation to discover areas for improvement.
Implement a Strong Identity Foundation
We’ll work with you to implement the principle of least privilege and enforce separation of duties with appropriate authorisation for each interaction with your AWS resources. In doing so, we’ll help you centralise privilege management and reduce reliance on long term credentials.
Enable Traceability
With our support, you’ll be capable of monitoring, alerting, and auditing actions and changes to your environment in real time. We can also show you how to integrate logs and metrics with systems so they automatically respond and take action.
Apply Security at all Layers
Instead of concentrating on the protection of a single outer layer, we’ll consult with you to apply a defense-in-depth approach with other security controls. What’s more, this can be applied to all layers, including edge networks, VPCs, subnets, load balancers, every instance, operating systems, and applications.
Automate Security Best Practices
Improve your ability to securely scale more rapidly and cost effectively using automated, software-based security mechanisms. Our team will support you in creating secure architectures, including the implementation of controls that are defined and managed as code in version-controlled templates.
Protect Data in Transit and at Rest
We’ll help you to classify your data, organising it via levels of sensitivity. Doing so will mean you can use mechanisms such as encryption, tokenization, and access control where appropriate.
Keep People Away from Data
One of the best methods of reducing the risk of loss, modification, and human error when handling sensitive data is to eliminate the need for direct access and manual processing of that data. The Isotoma team will work with you to create mechanisms and tools that reduce the need for people to work with data directly.
Prepare for Security Events
By working with you to design an incident management process that aligns with your organisational requirements, we’ll help to ensure you are prepared for any incident. This includes running incident response simulations, and using tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation, and recovery.
See How You Could Achieve Security with a Free AWS Well-Architected Review
If you’re interested in improving the security of your AWS implementation with a free Well-Architected Review, we’d love to hear from you.