As we have progressed through the tour of AWS services and tools we have seen reasons to expand our cloud presence. This can be a security concern, but they also provide some excellent security tools. That brings us to Amazon Guard Duty. This service offers threat detection for your services, connections, and data.
Amazon Guard Duty: Quick and Easy Monitoring
Anyone who has tried to set up monitoring and threat detection knows that it usually requires some installation and a lot of configuration. That is one of the best features of this service. It can be turned on and off without worrying about the deployment. It also runs without a need to fear that it will degrade your systems. In a dynamic cloud environment, this sort of service is a dream come true.
Free Is Good
You might think this is a service worth trying out. The good news is that Amazon offers a 30-day free trial to see how it can help you. Once the test period is over, the pricing varies by region. You can check out the pricing page for more details on that. In general, it is priced idealy for you to add monitoring to your systems for a few months to see how well it works for you.
Getting Started
In the time it takes to read this article you can get started with this offering. It analyzes log files, so you have to point it to the ones you want to examine. Cloudtrail logs are great, but you might want to include VPC and DNS files as well in the mix.
With security being such an essential part of your environment it is never to start soon monitoring it. The free thirty days of analysis just makes this a no-brainer. If you only have a VM or two that you have to track then this may be more than you need. However, as your environment grows, this service is a much more scalable approach than worrying on a machine by machine basis.
