Securing Cloud Infrastructure with CIS Hardened Images

The Problem: Strict Compliance Requirements

A large federal agency responsible for managing critical agricultural programs needed to migrate its sensitive workloads to the cloud while meeting strict federal security and compliance standards, including FISMA and FedRAMP. Their primary challenge was ensuring their operating systems were secure, continuously hardened, and compliant across a vast cloud environment. Limited internal resources made it difficult to manage the configurations and updates required to prevent security vulnerabilities.

The Solution: Pre-configured Operation Systems

The agency adopted CIS Hardened Images on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) from the AWS Marketplace to secure their cloud infrastructure. These pre-configured operating systems are based on CIS Benchmarks, ensuring compliance with federal regulations right out of the box. With CIS Hardened Images on Amazon EC2, the agency could deploy secure, compliant systems in their AWS cloud environment without the need for extensive manual configuration. Automatic updates ensured that their systems remained protected against evolving threats, while CIS provided expert security guidance through regular patching and maintenance.

The Impact: Increased Efficiency and Reduced Resources

By leveraging CIS Hardened Images on Amazon EC2, the agency significantly accelerated the deployment of secure operating systems, reducing the time and resources required for setup. The pre-hardened images ensured that their cloud workloads were fully compliant with federal standards, including FedRAMP, FISMA, and NIST 800-53, without the need for manual configuration. Continuous updates from CIS kept their systems aligned with the latest security benchmarks, safeguarding them against emerging threats. This proactive approach allowed the agency to operate with greater efficiency, focusing on its primary mission while minimizing the effort and resources needed to maintain cloud security. As a result, the agency successfully modernized its cloud infrastructure with robust security and compliance built in from the start.