Introduction
Businesses are embarking on a path of innovation, adaptability, and success by leveraging the boundless capabilities of cloud-based solutions. Leading this exciting journey is AWS (Amazon Web Services), a pioneer offering an extensive array of services to revolutionise how organizations develop, deploy, and oversee their applications. Among its impressive offerings is AWS AppFabric, a powerful tool designed to enhance the performance, dependability, and scalability of cloud-native applications.
What is AWS AppFabric?
AppFabric is a cloud service that seamlessly connects SaaS applications within your organization. This platform allows IT and security teams to efficiently manage and secure these applications using a standardized schema, while employees can leverage generative AI to expedite daily tasks. Additionally, AppFabric consolidates activity events, establishes a unified event schema and database, provides analytics, and facilitates seamless connectivity with other AWS security products such as Security Data Lake and Security Hub.
How AWS AppFabric Works?
Amazon Web Services provides a wide range of global cloud-based products, including computing, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications. These services can be instantly accessed on-demand with pay-as-you-go pricing.
What Kind of Data is Available in AWS AppFabric?
Audit Logs Ingestions
SaaS applications generate Audit Log events for any administrative access by SaaS administrators. AWS AppFabric collects these audit logs from multiple SaaS applications, providing a centralized platform for monitoring purposes. The service retrieves audit log data every two minutes, and customers cannot adjust this frequency.
Examples
- New user provisioning
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) setting changes
- User permission role changes
- Password policy changes
User Information
SaaS application user information includes details about the users themselves (such as email and name), their permission roles (like admin or read-only), and their activity events (such as viewing, creating, or sharing).
Key Features and Components of AWS AppFabric
AWS AppFabric is ground-breaking in the realm of SaaS security, but very limited when offering a comprehensive SaaS security solution. Although it integrates seamlessly with the broader AWS ecosystem, it provides only limited data points, covering a small portion of the SaaS security threat landscape. While AppFabric helps monitor Audit Logs and queries for user information, it lacks the critical capabilities to provide security teams with a comprehensive view of their systems.
Near Real-time Events: Subscribing to webhook events to benefit from near real-time events instead of the current hardcoded 2-minute frequency.
Data Inventory: Complete discovery of all data stored in SaaS applications to understand who owns the data, and departments involved, and assess its exposure internally, externally, and publicly.
OAuth Apps Inventory: Identifying all the 3rd party OAuth tokens authorized by employees who have installed 3rd party tools, giving them programmatic access to your corporate data.
Business Context Enrichments (HRIS, IDP, EDR): Activity events and user information alone lack critical business context to speed up mitigation paths. Integrations with HRIS, IDP, and EDR offer comprehensive enhancements that support informed decision-making and automation.
DLP Scanning: AppFabric provides this capability through a third-party vendor integration, which means you’ll need to purchase an additional tool to enable PII/PHI/sensitive data scanning.
Remediation: Achieving immediate resolution to security incidents is the ultimate goal of enterprise security. For example, removing permission, changing ownership, deleting files, and running approvals.
Workflow Automation: To minimise the total cost of ownership (TCO), it’s essential to integrate workflow automation that links activity events, business context, and remediation processes.
Anomaly Detection: Leverage machine learning and AI models to detect anomalies across activity events, data sets, permission sets, third-party applications, and more.
Custom Downstream Integrations: Facilitate the streamlining of information to any custom endpoint using straightforward, generic HTTPS requests.
AppFabric Use Cases
- Connecting SaaS Applications: AppFabric natively integrates leading SaaS productivity and security applications, offering a fully managed solution for SaaS interoperability.
- Enhancing Security Posture: AppFabric automatically normalizes application data, allowing administrators to implement uniform policies, standardize security alerts, and manage user access seamlessly across multiple applications.
- Transforming Productivity: By providing a unified generative AI assistant, AppFabric enables employees to quickly obtain answers, automate task management, and generate insights across their SaaS productivity tools.
Conclusion
AWS AppFabric empowers businesses to build scalable, resilient, high-performance applications in the AWS cloud environment. By leveraging a comprehensive suite of managed services and tools, developers can address common challenges associated with building modern, cloud-native applications and deliver exceptional experiences to users. Whether it’s caching, messaging, streaming, orchestration, or serverless computing, AWS AppFabric provides the building blocks needed to build and operate applications at scale, enabling businesses to innovate faster and stay ahead of the competition in today’s digital economy.
