A leading movie theater chain wished to strengthen its cloud infrastructure. Modus Create’s security experts conducted a functional resilience and security review, enabled AWS SSO (now known as AWS IAM Identity Center) integration, and set the stage for a wider DevSecOps culture.
Our Work Involved
- Cloud Assessment
- Documentation and Toolset Review
- Process Review
- AWS SSO Integration
- Threat Modeling
Impact
- Stronger Security Posture
- DevSecOps Culture
- Secured User Access
3 Cloud Environments Secured
Cloud breaches can be catastrophic.
According to IBM’s data breach report, the average cost of a public cloud breach is a whopping $5.02 million. However, the solution isn’t going back to on-premises. The genie is out of the bottle. The cloud’s benefits are too vast for companies to ignore.
Organizations need to strengthen the security of the cloud, in the cloud.
The Problem
A popular movie theater chain in the US wished to reduce its cloud infrastructure threat surface. It also wanted to integrate its Active Directory (AD) with AWS cloud resources to enable single sign-on (SSO).
Modus Create’s cybersecurity experts joined the client team and kicked off a two-week security assessment to achieve the project outcomes.
Phase 1: Cloud Security
1. Process review
The assessment began with a series of interviews with key stakeholders. By obtaining a deeper understanding of roles, responsibilities, and pain points, the team identified high-impact opportunities.
2. Documentation and tooling
The client had limited documentation and the team discovered a massive opportunity to assimilate tools to automate the DevOps pipeline.
3. Functional resilience
Next, it was time to assess the client’s capability of detection and remediation in case of a cyber attack. The team also reviewed CI/CD pipeline usage, security, cloud infrastructure, and deployment repeatability among several other aspects of the client architecture.
4. Due diligence
Finally, our security experts investigated systems, processes, and technologies related to cloud infrastructure, DevOps practices, networking, and IAM. At the end of this phase, the client received a detailed report of findings and recommendations based on the threat/vulnerability severity and exposure ratings.
Phase 2: AWS SSO Integration
AWS SSO (now known as AWS IAM Identity Center) is a way to manage multiple AWS accounts and applications at the same time. It also supports multi-factor authentication (MFA), adding an extra layer of security to accounts. This saves time and reduces the risk of unauthorized access.
Our team suggested the steps to enable SSO and utilize its benefits. Furthermore, based on Phase I findings, we developed a strategic plan for securing the cloud environment and improving its development and deployment processes. This plan prioritized key tasks according to their place in the threat/vulnerability exposure matrix. Finally, we proposed a realistic timeline to address the vulnerabilities along with staffing recommendations.
Impact
The assessment covered three different AWS cloud environments, three key personnel, one repository, and one CI/CD pipeline. It helped the client address critical risks to its AWS infrastructure and modernize the DevOps pipeline.
By enabling the AD-AWS SSO integration, the client established a secure way to manage access to its accounts. Additionally, it implemented several of our recommendations such as enabling logging and monitoring, enabling MFA, encrypting resources, and adopting tools to automate the DevOps process. As a result, the client’s cloud infrastructure is now robust and able to withstand popular cyber attacks.
Vital Stats
Cloud environments secured
Security assessment duration
As an official AWS Select Tier Services and CloudFormation Delivery partner, Modus Create has led cloud transformation at several Global 2000 enterprises. Learn about our AWS partnership.