CIS Hardened Images Help Anitian Automate FedRAMP Compliance
As organizations move their workloads to the cloud, so too must compliance and security move. Organizations providing cloud solutions to the U.S. government must comply with FedRAMP. FedRAMP is a compliance framework specifically for cloud products and it is rapidly becoming a standard for cloud security.
FedRAMP is complex. It has over 400 different configuration requirements. Most organizations require 12-18 months to meet these complex requirements. Anitian’s new Compliance Automation product dramatically accelerates the process of building, configuring, and maintaining a FedRAMP compliant cloud environment. And part of this acceleration is the CIS Benchmarks and CIS Hardened Images for Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Now what used to take months can now be done in hours.
Step 1: CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark
Anitian started with the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark. CIS Benchmarks are configuration guidelines for various technology groups to safeguard systems against today’s evolving cyber threats, developed by a global community of cybersecurity experts. The CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark is integrated with several AWS security services (AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Audit Manager), and provides prescriptive guidance about the security configuration to set up an AWS working environment that is the foundation of the customer workload.
Step 2: CIS Hardened Images for Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
Anitian also leveraged the CIS Hardened Images for Amazon EC2 to help meet key FedRAMP requirements. These pre-hardened virtual machine images are secured according to the recommendations of their associated CIS Benchmarks. More secure than a standard base image, CIS Hardened Images for Amazon EC2 help protect against denial of service, unauthorized data access, and other cyber threats.
As stated in the DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (SRG), ver 1, Rel 3, CIS Benchmarks can be used in place of Security Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIGs) that are the configuration standards for DoD IA and IA-enabled devices/systems. Because CIS Benchmarks have been recognized as a suitable baseline in lieu of STIGs and SRGs, the corresponding CIS Hardened Images for Amazon EC2 also meet these cloud security requirements.
FedRAMP Compliance on AWS
Anitian has leveraged CIS Benchmarks and CIS Hardened Images for Amazon EC2 to create “audit ready” AWS environments, accelerating the process of obtaining FedRAMP authorization for application environments.
“CIS Hardened Images are a vital component of our Compliance Automation product,” said Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian. “The CIS images are a proven configuration baseline that customers can trust to help accelerate the FedRAMP authorization process.”
The CIS Hardened Images for Amazon EC2 and Foundations Benchmarks are another way CIS is helping to make cloud computing more consistent, reliable, and secure for public entities.
About Anitian
Anitian is the leader in cloud-delivered security and compliance solutions. Leveraging the power and scale of the cloud, the Anitian Sherlock platform automatically builds, configures, and monitors cloud environments to accelerate compliance with security frameworks such as PCI, FedRAMP, ISO, and more. Sherlock directly integrates with DevOps CI/CD pipelines to ensure continuous security and compliance delivery. Sherlock is backed with 24/7 threat hunting, compliance guardrails, managed detection and response, and expert security services. Find out more at http://www.anitian.com