What is AWS Network Firewall?

by Hannah Grace Holladay / February 15, 2023

Firewalls are among the most useful information security and compliance tools. Their role is to monitor traffic moving between network borders to determine whether it should be allowed to pass. Among other responsibilities, firewalls prevent unauthorized access to networks on which sensitive data is stored, making them an essential tool for businesses seeking to comply with regulations and standards that include HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC 2, and more.  This…

5 Reasons to Migrate Your Data Center to the Cloud

by Hannah Grace Holladay / February 15, 2023

Have you considered moving your business’s data center to the cloud? The proportion of businesses operating an in-house data center declined over the last decade. Many—from small companies to multinational corporations—migrated their workloads to the cloud. Estimates suggest that about a third of businesses run more than 50% of their workloads in the cloud, and the majority run at least some workloads on cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services…

How To Make Data Protection a Competitive Advantage

by Hannah Grace Holladay / February 15, 2023

In 2022, data protection is (or should be) a top priority for any business that collects sensitive data, whether that’s personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, intellectual property, or business information. Regulatory compliance is often the primary motivation for implementing a data protection strategy. The penalties for non-compliance with HIPAA, the GDPR, PCI DSS,  the CCPA, and other data privacy regulations can damage or even destroy a small or medium…

10 S3 Best Practices for Improving AWS Security

by Hannah Grace Holladay / April 12, 2023

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) celebrated its 15th birthday in 2021. S3 was conceived as a straightforward scalable object storage system developers could use without concerning themselves with files systems—everything on S3 is an addressable object in a bucket. S3 quickly rose to dominate the object storage space. Because it is used everywhere, AWS S3 security as well as the privacy and confidentiality of the data businesses store…

Testing MFA Controls: Learning from the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory

by Hannah Grace Holladay / June 14, 2023

You thought you did everything right. You enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all of your accounts and configured it so that all employees and customers are required to use it. You have automated checks set up to make sure MFA is still required. And yet you still experience a data breach. This is exactly what happened to the non-governmental organization (NGO) described in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and…