How to Build a Successful AWS Security Hub Proof of Concept (PoC)
In today’s complex cloud environments, maintaining a clear view of your security posture is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. AWS Security Hub offers a powerful solution by centralizing security findings from various AWS services and third-party tools into a single, manageable dashboard. However, deploying a new security service across an entire organization can be a daunting task.
This is where a well-structured Proof of Concept (PoC) becomes invaluable. A PoC allows you to demonstrate the value of Security Hub, test its capabilities, and gain stakeholder buy-in before committing to a full-scale rollout. Here’s a practical guide to developing an effective AWS Security Hub PoC.
Why a Proof of Concept is Essential
Before diving into the technical steps, it’s crucial to understand the benefits of a PoC. A focused trial period helps your team:
- Validate the Technology: Confirm that Security Hub meets your specific security and compliance requirements.
- Understand the Impact: See firsthand how findings are generated, aggregated, and prioritized without disrupting production workloads.
- Refine Your Strategy: Test automation and remediation workflows in a controlled environment.
- Build a Business Case: Provide concrete data and demonstrations to justify the investment in time and resources.
Phase 1: Planning and Scoping Your PoC
A successful PoC begins with a clear plan. Rushing into the implementation without defining your goals will lead to inconclusive results.
Define Clear Objectives and Success Criteria: What do you want to achieve? Your goals could be to centralize findings from AWS GuardDuty and Inspector, measure compliance against the CIS benchmark, or test automated notifications for high-severity findings. Your success criteria should be specific and measurable, such as “Successfully aggregate all high-severity GuardDuty findings from two development accounts within 24 hours.”
Select the Right AWS Accounts: Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start with a small, controlled environment, such as one or two non-production accounts. This minimizes risk and allows you to focus on the configuration and testing process without impacting critical business operations.
Choose Your Security Standards: AWS Security Hub supports several industry standards out of the box. For your PoC, select one or two that are most relevant to your organization. Good starting points include:
- AWS Foundational Security Best Practices: A fundamental set of controls that help you secure your AWS environment.
- CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark: A widely recognized standard for hardening AWS accounts.
- PCI DSS: Essential if your organization handles cardholder data.
Phase 2: Implementation and Configuration
With a solid plan in place, you can now begin the technical setup. The key is to establish a centralized management structure.
Designate a Delegated Administrator Account: To effectively manage Security Hub across multiple accounts, designate one AWS account as the delegated administrator. This account will serve as the central hub, aggregating findings and managing configurations for all other “member” accounts included in your PoC. This follows AWS best practices for security management.
Enable Security Hub and Key Integrations: In your designated administrator account, enable Security Hub. Then, proceed to enable it in your chosen member accounts. A critical part of the PoC is to see how it consolidates data, so be sure to enable the core AWS security services you want to test, such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Config, and Amazon Inspector. These integrations will automatically begin sending their findings to Security Hub.
Configure and Customize Standards: Once enabled, activate the security standards you selected during the planning phase. Security Hub will immediately begin running checks against these controls and generating findings based on your resource configurations.
Phase 3: Testing and Validating Findings
Now it’s time to see Security Hub in action. You need to generate data to prove that the system is working as expected.
Generate Sample Findings: A safe and effective way to test the pipeline is to use built-in features. Security Hub can generate sample findings for its integrated services, like GuardDuty or Inspector. This allows you to test notification and response workflows without having to create a genuine security risk.
Simulate a Real-World Misconfiguration: To demonstrate real value, intentionally create a common misconfiguration in one of your test accounts. For example, temporarily create an S3 bucket and set its public access policy to be overly permissive. Within a short time, Security Hub (via its AWS Foundational Security Best Practices checks) should detect this and generate a high-priority finding. This provides a powerful, tangible example for stakeholders.
Review the Security Hub Dashboard: Spend time navigating the dashboard. Analyze how findings are displayed, sorted by severity, and linked to specific resources. Pay close attention to your compliance scores for the standards you enabled. This dashboard will be the primary tool for your security teams, so understanding its features is crucial.
Phase 4: Demonstrating Automation and Remediation
The true power of Security Hub is unlocked when you move from simple detection to automated response. A PoC is the perfect place to showcase this potential.
Integrate with Amazon EventBridge: Security Hub is natively integrated with Amazon EventBridge, which acts as a central event bus. You can create rules in EventBridge that listen for specific types of findings from Security Hub.
Build a Simple Automated Response: For your PoC, create a practical automation workflow. For instance, configure an EventBridge rule that triggers an AWS Lambda function whenever a “Critical” or “High” severity finding is generated. This Lambda function could be programmed to:
- Send a detailed notification to a Slack channel.
- Create a ticket in a project management system like Jira.
- For more advanced scenarios, trigger an AWS Systems Manager Automation document to automatically remediate the issue.
Demonstrating a “finding-to-notification” or “finding-to-ticket” workflow is often the most compelling part of a PoC for management and operations teams.
Evaluating Your PoC and Planning Next Steps
After completing your tests, compile your results. Present a demonstration to your stakeholders, highlighting how Security Hub met the objectives defined in the planning phase. Showcase the centralized dashboard, the quick detection of the simulated misconfiguration, and the automated notification workflow.
By following this structured approach, you can effectively demonstrate the value of AWS Security Hub, ensuring your organization is better equipped to manage its cloud security posture with confidence and clarity.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-develop-an-aws-security-hub-poc/
