The Challenge

In 2020, Camarade signed up with EPI-USE Services for AWS, for managed support. By then, their AWS environment was already set up and resources were deployed. However, our in-depth analysis of their infrastructure recommended improvements, specifically to security. Subsequently, we started working towards improving their cloud security postures through rigorous audits, monitoring, and recommendations. Our team of experts also recognized the need to implement security best practices, and to establish effective monitoring and governance strategies for the client’s infrastructure. By incorporating a cost-conscious approach, we were able to highlight areas of possible cost optimization without compromising on system performance.

The Solution

Based on our analysis and audit findings, we were able to suggest and implement proper security measures and governance strategies for Camarade. We simultaneously devised an action plan for cost optimization and effective data backup within the client’s AWS environment, including:

Enhancing Camarade’s security posture

•  Strictly adhered to IAM security best practices, such as minimizing root user logins for everyday administrative tasks, enforcing MFA, delegating IAM users following the principle of least privilege, and removing dormant IAM users from the account.
•  Evaluated Security Groups (SGs) to ensure they allowed restricted access; modified SGs that were overly permissive, and removed the ones that were no longer in use.
•  Did a complete and detailed review of every single resource that was deployed in the environment.
•  Notified Camarade regarding the resources that were publicly accessible and took necessary measures to improve their security posture.

Data protection and effective disaster recovery

•  Recommended introducing appropriate backup strategies for Camarade’s EC2 Instances.

Proper monitoring and governance strategies for client servers

•  Added client servers to our Internal OMD monitoring system to ensure rapid detection of issues, thus improving the application availability.
•  Enabled external monitoring for Camarade’s public-facing URLs.
•  Enforced resource tagging within Camarade's AWS environment.
•  Enabled Cloud trail to keep track of account activities within Camarade’s infrastructure.

Optimizing AWS costs

•  Removed obsolete resources within the AWS environment.
•  Analyzed usage patterns of resources and suggested possible options to downsize underutilized resources.
•  Performed several resource upgrades to the latest generation for better price performance. A few of the examples include upgrading RDS dB instances to T4g series, and upgrading EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3.