What are CIS Standards and why you should care to protect your company

RenoZone aims to re-think, re-design, and revolutionize the way we handle configuration of Landing Zone in AWS Cloud based on CIS standards. But what exactly are CIS standards? What role do they play in the cloud ecosystem, and where does RenoZone stand in the whole picture?

Any businesses, regardless of size, always share one ultimate goal of maximizing revenue and growth. However, as companies increase in size and brand recognition, they inevitably become vulnerable to cyber threats. Hackers with malicious intent constantly lurked in the shadows, eagerly searching for any security loopholes to exploit. As much as anyone would hate to admit, there is no happy ending to this story. It is estimated that 2,200 cyber attacks took place each day in the year 2022 with the damage cost being predicted to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. These dreadful numbers are pushing corporations to look for ways to strengthen cyber security defenses, leading to the foundation of CIS Benchmarks. 

What are CIS Standards?

CIS Standards, established by the Center for Internet Security (CIS), consist of a collection of widely acknowledged and collaboratively crafted recommendations for security professionals aiming to effectively implement and oversee their cybersecurity measures. These guidelines have been developed in consultation with a diverse group of security experts from around the world and serve as a proactive defense strategy to protect organizations from evolving threats. By adhering to the CIS Benchmark guidelines, companies can fortify their digital assets against vulnerabilities arising from improper configurations.

CIS Benchmarks hold significant importance due to their ability to provide security professionals and subject matter experts with established best practices for deploying various vendor products. These guidelines serve as a valuable foundation for creating deployment plans for new products or services, as well as for ensuring the security of existing deployments.

Implementing CIS Benchmarks allows organizations to enhance the security of their legacy systems against both common and emerging risks. This can be achieved through actions such as disabling unused ports, removing unnecessary app permissions, limiting administrative privileges, and disabling unnecessary services, which ultimately improve the performance of IT systems and applications.

For instance, administrators can follow the comprehensive CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark guidelines to establish a robust password policy for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). These guidelines cover various aspects such as password policy enforcement, multi-factor authentication (MFA) usage, disabling root access, and regular rotation of access keys. By adhering to these guidelines, organizations can significantly enhance the security of their AWS accounts.

How does RenoZone come into play?

Take the example stated above into consideration but imagine yours as a multinational organization with IT Teams stationed at different locations and speak different languages while having to follow that one specific CIS benchmark to the letter. As much as the management team loves to deny, human errors and discrepancy during configuration is inescapable. Surely “one misconfiguration wouldn’t hurt” is a common mentality when it comes to this kind of situation, but definitely not without consequences. Capital One was one of the unlucky companies who ended up paying $80 million to cover up a mistake caused by misconfiguration in the cloud. 

So how could we prevent this costly incident from happening? One solution could be having an in-house team of cloud experts, which is effective but of course, not efficient money-wise. If yours is not an organization filled with abundant resources but must meet stringent security and compliance requirements in the cloud, then RenoZone is an excellent choice for you.

RenoZone offers organizations a fast and secure solution for moving workloads on AWS. With RenoZone, businesses could safely fast-track their cloud journey by utilizing a pre-built, server-less, and fully automated enterprise-scale solution running on Infrastructure as Code and Cloud native services. The results are fully automated resources configuration and security event governance always at your disposal, while being strictly complied with AWS best practices and CIS standards.

RenoZone aims to automate the following aspects of your AWS account:

– Account baseline provisioning with vending machine

– Remediation actions of critical controls

– Report for non-compliant resources

– Compliance of AWS best practices in alignment with the CIS standards

About Renova Cloud

Renova Cloud is a leading AWS consulting partner in Vietnam, Myanmar, and Cambodia. Our focus is to accelerate the success of our customers throughout cloud transformation and modernization processes. With expertise in Cloud Computing Solutions, DevOps and Managed Services, Renova Cloud is a highly integrated team of skilled engineers, architect and DevOps with the proven capabilities and experience in execution of advanced technologies projects.