An AWS security assessment evaluates the security posture of an AWS account, analysing the cloud resources contained in an account and their configuration. The goal of this assessment is to find any resources or vulnerabilities that can be maliciously utilised to compromise any services hosted in the AWS Account. Minimising these vulnerabilities will result in the hosted services being more resilient to attack and therefore adopting a stronger security posture.
Unlike the functional aspects of a service - ie what the service has to actually do - analysing the security posture focuses specifically on the resilience of the service to malicious attacks and manipulation rather than the functional capability of the service. That means that a security assessment isn’t analysing how well a service functions but how much of a security risk the service poses.
A security assessment differs from regular development in its primary focus on evaluating and strengthening the security posture of a system, rather than just delivering functional features. While the ideal scenario involves achieving a strong security posture alongside the required functionality, it’s common in software development for functionality to take precedence, often neglecting security, which can lead to vulnerabilities.
The purpose of an AWS Security Assessment is to objectively evaluate the security strength of an AWS account’s configurations and resources. This is a particular focus on the security posture of AWS resources with the understanding that the security posture of AWS resources may be reduced given the focus on software development.
Once completed, the security assessment should be weighed against the business and technological objectives to ensure that any identified security risks or compromises are acceptable within the broader context of business needs. Security’s role is to protect the business, reduce risks such as data breaches or service disruptions, and prevent malicious attacks, but not to hinder operational goals.
This is where security consulting plays a crucial role, as a business-focused security partner can help balance security risks against business priorities. This will ensure that the right level of security is applied given the desired investment and development complexity ensuring maximum return on investment while aligning with the organisation’s objectives.
There are three key elements to getting Cloud Security Assessments that are unique to this kind of assessment. This includes:
The key advantage of performing a security assessment on an AWS account or other cloud platforms is the accessibility of cloud resources through the provider’s APIs. This allows for a comprehensive scan of your entire IT infrastructure, enabling automated and customise analysis to quickly identify security issues and evaluate the overall security posture of your AWS account.
This approach not only assesses the security elements of a cloud provider’s account but also leverages custom tooling to deliver near-instant analysis and reporting. At SkySiege, our custom built products build on this transparency of cloud hosted resources to deliver full security scans within minutes, having successfully conducted security assessments for hundreds of accounts and delivering fast and reliable insights into their security posture the same day.
While an overall security analysis is valuable, it must be aligned with business objectives. To achieve this, it’s important to classify vulnerabilities by levels of criticality—such as low, medium, high, and critical. This approach helps prioritise vulnerabilities based on their potential impact on the business.
As each Cloud Resource is easily queried and standardised, we’re able to calculate and categorise configurations and their risk patterns quickly, providing a standardised analysis that can then be compared against business needs.
At SkySiege, this classification process is a key part of our assessments, ensuring that security efforts focus on vulnerabilities that could affect the business most without needing to perform a contextual assessment on each environment.
Our third important factor is that it’s possible to securely host insecure software in cloud environments. Thanks to the wide array of tools, network configurations, and protective measures available in the cloud, insecure applications can be safeguarded effectively. In contrast, a secure application hosted in an insecure environment is more likely to be compromised than insecure software hosted in a secure Cloud environment. With this in mind, understanding the Cloud environment’s security posture can be more important than understanding the insecure application’s security posture. This becomes more apparent when most services incorporate software that is not directly built or maintained by the organisation. Therefore, there is a reliance on the cloud environment to help protect all components of a service as it’s likely that not all components of the service are under active management.
With these three factors combined an AWS Security Assessment delivers:
Due to the above reasons as well as our custom tools that deliver assessments the same day, we advise the majority of our clients to get a Cloud Security Assessment completed. It is usually the fastest, easiest and most efficient way to identify immediate security issues in our client’s environment, providing valuable insights with clarity and speed.
An AWS Security Assessment will not provide a worthwhile return on investment for all services. For smaller environments with minimal cloud resource usage and smaller risk profile, the need for an assessment won’t be worth the cost. However, it’s important to recognise that it only takes one vulnerability to compromise an entire service. The real concern isn’t the extent of cloud usage, but the potential “blast radius” and impact of a compromise, which can lead to legal issues, fines, reputation damage, data theft, or significant downtime. These risks depend on:
Before scheduling an assessment ask yourself questions such as:
In some cases, like personal blogs, the return on investment (ROI) for a cloud assessment might not justify the cost, especially if the blog isn’t essential to your business’ revenue. If however that blog drives revenue through lead generation or affiliate marketing, securing it could be crucial, as any downtime or compromise could significantly hurt your business.
For financial services firms, regular cloud vulnerability assessments are essential. Due to regulatory requirements, these businesses must ensure their cloud environments and software are secure. Financial regulators, many of whom use AWS or other cloud providers, are familiar with what secure cloud configurations look like. This makes assessments a key contributor to compliant business operations.
For startups and e-commerce firms, the volume of personal information managed is a critical factor. Legal frameworks such as GDPR and other data protection regulations are becoming stricter, and any mishandling of customer data - such as names, email addresses, and other identifiable details - can result in severe penalties. E-commerce businesses, especially those beyond a one-person operation, are likely to suffer significant consequences if compromised, both in terms of data privacy and business continuity.
Smaller e-commerce operations may still benefit from vulnerability assessments, though the ROI depends on factors like handling regulated goods or the risk of reputation damage. However, larger e-commerce firms are particularly vulnerable to the impact of downtime, where even a few hours of disruption can have serious cash flow consequences. In these cases, investing in a vulnerability assessment to detect, analyse, and resolve major security issues is crucial to maintaining business stability and customer trust.
If you’re looking for guidance or if you believe a security assessment would be beneficial then you can order a SkySiege AWS Vulnerability Scan. Our Vulnerability Scan analyses all AWS resources in your desired AWS account and generates a full report containing:
If you are hosting applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it is important to consider the impact to AWS from your penetration testing. A key aspect of this consideration is determining whether what penetration testing can be safely conducted on the AWS platform without advanced permission and which testing should be abstained from without prior agreement.
penetration testing cloud aws
