Securing your Application in AWS through WAF

Securing Application in Cloud Era

As more companies move their applications to the cloud, it's important to ensure that these applications are properly secured. One way to do this is through the use of a web application firewall (WAF), which can help protect your applications from a variety of attacks.

AWS WAF - Web Application Firewall

AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web applications by defining customizable web security rules. AWS WAF is effective at blocking common web exploits (aka OWASP Top 10) such as SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and DDoS attacks such as HTTP floods, abusive users and bad bots such as crawlers, content scrapers and scanners.

AWS WAF provides this through managed rule set that is constantly updated with the latest rules to help protect your web applications.

WAF-as-a-Service

In addition, AWS Marketplace offers managed rule groups for AWS WAF that includes rules from multiple vendors such as Cyber Security Cloud, F5, Fortinet, etc. These managed rule groups are updated weekly with the latest rules from the rule providers. Managed rule groups can help you save time and money by simplifying rule management. With a managed rule group, you don't need to individually subscribe to and manage each rule. In addition, managed rule groups can help you reduce operational overhead by providing a centralized place to view and update the rules that are protecting your we applications.

When you subscribe to a managed rule group, AWS Firewall Manager creates a rule group in your AWS account. This rule group contains the rules from the rule providers that are included in the managed rule group. AWS Firewall Manager automatically updates the rule group when new versions of the rules are released by the rule providers.

WAF and CloudFront

You also can use AWS WAF with CloudFront to help protect your websites and web applications from attacks. CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that speeds up the delivery of static and dynamic web content. By using CloudFront and AWS WAF together, you can improve the security of your web applications while still delivering content quickly and reliably across the world.

Conclusion

While a WAF can be a helpful security measure, it is important to remember that it is not a replacement for other security measures, such as appropriate access control measures. A WAF should be used in conjunction with other security measures to provide the best possible protection for your applications.