Top AWS Cloud Adoption Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
The shift to the cloud has occurred at an exponential rate over the past few years, with AWS firmly entrenched as the market leader. Here’s a list of missteps to avoid to make your transition to AWS a success.
AWS aims to deliver cost-effective infrastructure and services at the touch of a button. However, many users, particularly those new to AWS, often feel disoriented while attempting to leverage its potential fully. This leads to significant gaffes, such as exposing sensitive data and assets. This article addresses more of these pitfalls and ways to avoid them while getting started with AWS. Read on.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has retained its position as the cloud infrastructure market leader for years. Synergy Research Group’s latest statistics show that AWS has a market share of 33% in the global cloud infrastructure business in 2022, which is still greater than the combined market share of its two main competitors, Microsoft and Google. However, Microsoft and Google’s year-over-year revenue growth has accelerated in recent years, indicating stiff competition amid the surging adoption of cloud services globally.
Many organizations, big or small, face various issues in the initial stages after migrating to AWS. A lack of understanding of cloud services’ limitations also prevents a smooth migration. This article looks at some of the top hurdles organizations face and viable solutions that allow for a seamless cloud shift.
Top AWS Pitfalls & Ways to Avoid Them
Outages
Error: AWS is relatively secure, but it isn’t without flaws. There have been well-publicized outages in which firms discovered that one of the Amazon data centers where their data was hosted had a severe network issue, resulting in lost income and credibility of the user company.
Solution: New customers should use AWS’s Availability Zones to route workload across several data centers within an AWS region to reduce the risk of interruptions. Furthermore, users can balance workloads by distributing them across many servers.
Customers can also use horizontal partitioning to provide an extra layer of redundancy to each app stage. To ensure robust horizontal partitioning, redundant instances must be located in various availability zones to reduce application failures and downtime caused by data center failures that are bound to occur in the long run.
See More: Amazon S3 Bucket Misconfigurations: Top Two Causes & How to Combat Them
Administrator access to all
Error: Jay Paz, senior director of delivery at Cobalt, points out that without restricting administrator access, we might unintentionally give access to data to those it’s not intended for. With broad administrator access, hackers can exploit valuable company data and private customer information more efficiently if systems are compromised.
Solution: The beginners switching to AWS cloud should examine the repercussions before using technology and take appropriate precautions in their business. They must verify cloud management and security system before transferring vital corporate information to a third party.
Physical access should be strictly regulated at the perimeter and entrance points using various methods, including physical security personnel, video monitoring, and intrusion prevention systems.
In some of the best practices posted by AWS, they mentioned securing passwords and access keys as the most important step:
- Passwords and access keys are the two most common credentials used to access an AWS account.
- AWS root user account passwords and access keys can be applied to individual AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users.
- Passwords and access keys should be treated with the same care as other sensitive personal information.
- Never put them in code that may be accessed by the public (for example, a public Git repository). All security credentials should be rotated and updated regularly for increased security.
Users can consider utilizing git-secrets to scan for AWS credentials and other sensitive information if they use GitHub for document or code versioning and sharing. One can avoid committing code or documents that contain sensitive information by using git-secrets.
To safeguard access keys that only have API access, create a multi authentication (MFA) device. Users can also use MFA to fine-tune which API actions require an MFA token to be executed.
If users believe a password or access key pair has been compromised, take the following steps:
- All-access key pairs should be rotated.
- Change the password for the root user.
- Follow the steps outlined at My AWS account may be compromised.
Untracked and mismanaged certificates
Issue: When people think about AWS security mistakes, they often think of misconfigured S3 bucket permissions or accidentally public Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). But Harry Haramis, SVP of cloud & SaaS marketplaces at Keyfactor, says that one of the biggest and commonly overlooked mistakes is untracked and mismanaged certificates.
As an example, Haramis cites the Epic Games outage. In this case, a service-to-service wildcard certificate used across hundreds of machines in AWS expired without notice, triggering a 5+ hour outage that pulled more than 25 people (and likely many more) out of their day-to-day priorities into a Zoom call to resolve the issue.
- The first issue was that they did not apply AWS Config monitoring to all AWS ACM-based certificates, so no one was alerted in advance that the certificate was about to expire.
- Secondly, automatic renewals were not enabled for the internal certificate because “this had not been prioritized when identified earlier in the year,” according to Epic Games.
“Of course, it didn’t help that they leveraged a single wildcard certificate across hundreds of servers, which dramatically increased the blast radius of the outage,” he adds.
See More: Top 5 AWS Misconfigurations That Led to Data Leaks in 2021
Solution: Haramis says organizations need to prioritize their “PKI and certificate management strategy before migrating services and applications to AWS.” How will they issue certificates for services both within and outside of AWS? How will they track them? How will they monitor and renew those certificates before they expire? “Teams can start by enabling an AWS Config rule to alert for certificate expiration and leverage AWS ACM to renew certificates, but that’s just the beginning.”
Most companies leveraging AWS are also leveraging a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. He further suggests that they need to consistently apply visibility, policy enforcement, expiration alerting, and automation across certificates in their environments and use cases, not just AWS-native services. Third-party solutions offer the “ability to issue, monitor, and automate” the management of certificates across these more complex environments, whether publicly issued or privately issued certificates, on-premise or across any cloud platform.
Misconfigurations
Issue: One of the most common issues putting an obstacle in AWS cloud adoption can be a misconfiguration. After phishing and compromised credentials, misconfigurations are the third most prevalent attack vector, reports Devin Partida. Configuration mistakes cost an average of $3.86 million in breaches. Jen Knobel, writing for Barr Advisory, offers the following frequent misconfiguration consequences to be aware of if you’re new to AWS or considering a cloud migration:
- Without any needed authentication, data is accidentally exposed to the public internet.
- Providing public access to buckets of storage.
- Network functionality is created incorrectly.
- Providing all system users with more than the required access to cloud-stored data.
- Encryption passwords and keys are exposed.
A compromise of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is another issue. According to IBM X-Force, incorrectly configured APIs were implicated in two-thirds of the investigated cases.
Solution: Having numerous eyes look at what is configured, why it is configured, and its risk is the best method to manage misconfigurations. This is the purpose of policy-mandated change management practices. Employees should be informed of the consequences of neglecting change management in favor of cloud-based modifications. Misconfigured container and API interfaces may also be avoided using confidential computing.
Migration costs and resource usage
Issue: Many organizations make mistakes while evaluating a service, resulting in erroneous cost estimates. The cost of using the AWS cloud differs based on the service and the number of users. In fact, many AWS users don’t keep track of their capacity utilization. Hence, they wind up underutilizing, if not completely ignoring, the AWS services. AWS bills for all the services purchased, whether those services are utilized or not.
Solution: Here are some tips to help you avoid wasting AWS resources and save money on AWS services:
- Reduce application computation expenses by using AWS EC2 reserved instances.
- Sift through AWS invoices to verify that you are not paying for resources or apps you aren’t aware of.
- Ensure to add or remove resources from these apps throughout application design to maintain a high resource usage rate.
- To keep track of AWS charges, use AWS’s Trusted Advisor service or commercial resource use and cost tracking solution.
AWS security
Issue: Tightening up security and being aware of system flaws is one way to prevent undiscovered vulnerabilities, observes Paz. The more layers of AWS microservices rolled out, the more the system becomes complicated, and the potential scope of exposure expands.
Some of the security vulnerabilities that cybercriminals tend to conduct on AWS include:
- Targeting and compromising AWS IAM keys
- Hijacking vulnerable domains due to Cloudfront misconfiguration.
- Applying Lambda backdoor functionality and establishing access to private clouds.
- Hiding evidence of intrusion by obfuscating Cloudtail logs.
Solution: For cybersecurity professionals, he suggests it’s essential to regularly perform AWS pentesting and configuration reviews to anticipate these challenges. “Professional pentesters know what to test and which simulations require Amazon pentest approval as well as what configuration flaws pose risk to the security posture of cloud deployments.”
To conclude
AWS cloud migration involves a lot of preparation and skill, but moving in the right manner saves money and satisfies company goals. As a result, it’s critical to enlist the support of AWS migration professionals or partners who provide AWS migration services and benefit from their expertise.
Did you face starting troubles after migrating to the cloud? Let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
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