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Getting Started with Cloud Data Security for Amazon RDS

By Craig Burlingame posted 08-24-2020 02:45

  
Pic found here https://unsplash.com/photos/M7dI2Fvgrl4


Imperva’s newest product gives RDS users unparalleled control over their cloud security infrastructure

Enterprise asset infrastructure is getting increasingly complex with each passing day. Assets are commonly spread throughout different locations, departments, and databases, often without a consistent, well-organized substructure in place.

This results in a lack of visibility, especially in critical applications like cybersecurity. Enterprise cloud security professionals do not have the tools to immediately describe the security condition of database assets supporting particular business processes, identify who is using them, or find out where they are located in real-time.

Imperva’s Cloud Data Security product bridges that gap, enabling security professionals to readily answer questions about asset security conditions, usage, and location. This contributes to enterprise asset visibility, process efficiency, and of course, security.

Introducing Imperva Cloud Data Security (CDS)

Amazon RDS users in the United States are among the first to enjoy Imperva’s new Cloud Data Security (CDS) product. This gives security engineers the ability to automatically identify database asset services and manage assets containing sensitive data across the entire cloud data estate.

Cloud Data Security grants a complete overview of the security states of every cloud database asset in your environment from a single dashboard. This makes it easier than ever to fulfill your end of Amazon’s shared responsibility model in an efficient way, while empowering asset visibility initiatives and keeping sensitive data safe.

Here is a webinar that Imperva's Product Manager will take you through a demo of the new product

Why Use Imperva Cloud Data Security for Amazon RDS?

While Amazon RDS offers excellent performance for high throughput web and mobile applications operating at a very large scale, it cannot address every security-related blind spot in the enterprise data estate.

For example, Amazon RDS users have long been aware of the problems with Amazon’s security grouping features when running an overlay network on top of a virtual private cloud. Users can apply security policies to data container clusters, but not to individual pods. Your visibility into communications will stop at the traffic between hosts in the cluster, rather than directly addressing each individual pod.

As a result, RDS users find themselves using two separate cloud security solutions in parallel: One governs virtual machine policies, while the other handles containers. Creating a network policy for a single application that relies on both containers and virtual machines requires maintaining and administering separate solutions.

Lack of visibility is another important issue. 62% of enterprise IT decision-makers believe that their on-premises security infrastructure is stronger than their cloud security solution. As the cloud environment becomes more complex, users feel like they have less and less visibility into data, communications, and policy control.

Intelligently segmenting database assets, gathering data on their security conditions, and making that data easily accessible is key to making complex cloud environments manageable. Imperva’s Cloud Data Security solution makes that possible by enhancing visibility, automatically discovering sensitive data, and giving security engineers on-demand insight into relational database workflows.

What Imperva Cloud Data Security Offers

Upon implementation, Imperva CDS automatically identifies and classifies security assets and incidents, showing their severity and offering insight into the distribution of security incidents over time.


Imperva’s innovative approach to cloud security centers around nine intuitive displays that offer a complete overview of the cloud environment. This is where users can interact with the most important security events happening in their database in real-time:

  • Dashboard. This presents an overview of the security status of every asset in your cloud environment. Important security incidents and events will be displayed here, including a summary of your assets, service alarms, security incidents, and service status.
  • Assets. This lists all of your data assets alongside their basic characteristics. This is where you can see which Cloud Data Security services have been enabled for each individual asset. Use this display to find out if assets are running, stopped, disconnected, or deleted, and categorize them by sensitivity level automatically.
  • Security Incidents. All of the security incidents impacting database assets in your estate will be displayed here. Imperva CDS allows users to drill down into each incident for more context and information. Every incident can be categorized by description, timing, severity, impacted database, and acknowledgement status.
  • Reports. When you create reports for your data estate, they will appear here. The solution supports drill-down examination, report scheduling, and running reports on-the-fly.
  • Policy Alerts. Imperva CDS will raise alerts from monitored traffic according to your security policies here.
  • Service Alarms. Act on urgent data security service alarms with recommendations from the service alarms display. Users can drill down into each alarm for more data and context, and manage alarms by description, element type, time frame, or acknowledgement status.
  • Policies. All of the policies you have created will show up here. You can edit, activate, or deactivate policies directly from this display.
  • Settings. This is where you can configure your CDS services and manage the way the solution interacts with newly discovered assets.
  • Cloud Accounts. Add, edit, and remove cloud accounts from your data estate here.

Getting Started With Imperva CDS: Adding Your Cloud Account

Imperva recommends using the automatic deployment feature to connect your CDS account to Amazon AWS. All you have to do is fill in your AWS Account ID on CDS, then log into your AWS account and verify the new configuration.

Before beginning your first database audit, you will have to enable the native audit log feature in RDS. This allows you to classify data and perform security analytics based on audit results, and store the audit itself as a formalized event. This process varies based on the specific database you are using:

  • To enable Native Audit for PostgreSQL RDS, click here.
  • To enable Native Audit for Aurora PostgreSQL RDS, click here.
  • To enable Native Audit for MySQL RDS, click here.
  • To enable Native Audit for Aurora MySQL RDS, click here.
  • To enable Native Audit for MariaDB RDS, click here.
  • To enable Native Audit for Oracle RDS, click here.

Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to begin working with Imperva CDS. Transparent, effective monitoring of enterprise cloud data and on-demand insight is now integrated into your cloud security infrastructure.

Learn more With Imperva Community  

The Imperva Community is a great place to learn more about how to use Imperva cybersecurity technologies like DDoS protection,  Cloud WAF, Advanced Bot Protection and more to establish efficient, secure processes for enterprise networks. Rely on the expertise of Imperva partners, customers and technical experts. 


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