Yesterday, I published an article on Leveraging AWS Automated Testing to Prevent IT Outages: Insights from the CrowdStrike Glitch today to increase your awareness, this article will focus on what CrowdStrike could have done differently. You now know some of the automated testing tools available on AWS’ platform, here are others for you to consider.
I’d love to hear from you, how would you reconfigure or alter their approach (or what I’ve suggested below)?
Here are additional ways to CrowdStrike might leverage the following AWS services and best practices to elevate their performance and reliability to match or exceed the standards set by Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, FireEye, and Trend Micro.
Beyond automated testing, here are some key strategies and AWS services that CrowdStrike could use:
1. Blue/Green Deployments
Blue/Green Deployment:
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CodeDeploy support blue/green deployments, which reduce downtime and risk by running two identical production environments. This ensures that updates can be tested in a live-like environment before switching over.
- Benefits: Minimizes downtime and ensures seamless transition between old and new versions, reducing the risk of deployment failures impacting users.
2. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
CI/CD Pipelines:
- AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild automate the build, test, and deploy process, ensuring that code changes are rigorously tested before going live.
- AWS CodeArtifact manages dependencies and artifacts, ensuring consistency across environments.
- Benefits: Enhances deployment frequency and reliability by automating the end-to-end process.
3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
IaC Tools:
- AWS CloudFormation and AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit)enable the modeling and setting up of AWS resources using code, ensuring consistent and repeatable deployments.
- Benefits: Reduces configuration drift and enables quick recovery from failures by recreating the infrastructure reliably.
4. Enhanced Monitoring and Logging
Monitoring and Logging:
- Amazon CloudWatch provides detailed monitoring of applications and infrastructure, enabling the setting of alarms and dashboards to track performance metrics.
- AWS X-Ray offers detailed insights into the application’s interactions, helping to trace and debug complex issues.
- AWS CloudTrail logs API calls, providing a history of AWS account activity for audit and security purposes.
- Benefits: Improves visibility into system performance and helps in quick identification and resolution of issues.
5. Security and Compliance
Security Services:
- AWS Shield and AWS WAF protect against DDoS attacks and provide web application security, respectively.
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls access to AWS resources, ensuring that the principle of least privilege is enforced.
- AWS Config helps assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources.
- Benefits: Enhances security posture by protecting against threats and ensuring compliance with security policies.
6. Advanced Threat Detection and Response
Threat Detection:
- Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior.
- AWS Security Hub provides a comprehensive view of security alerts and compliance status across AWS accounts.
- Benefits: Proactively detects threats and enables a quick response to security incidents.
7. Scalability and High Availability
Scalable Architectures:
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of instances based on the demand.
- AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, ensuring high availability.
- Amazon RDS provides scalable database instances, while Amazon Aurora offers a highly performant and scalable database engine.
- Benefits: Ensures that applications can handle varying levels of load without downtime or performance degradation.
8. Disaster Recovery and Backup
Disaster Recovery:
- AWS Backup automates backup processes, ensuring that data is regularly backed up and can be restored quickly.
- AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery enables organizations to quickly recover from disruptions by replicating the production environment in another AWS region.
- Benefits: Minimizes data loss and downtime, ensuring business continuity.
Conclusion
Therefore, by leveraging these AWS services and strategies, CrowdStrike can enhance its performance, reliability, and security to match or exceed the capabilities of leading cybersecurity companies like Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, FireEye, and Trend Micro. These practices ensure that their systems are robust, scalable, and resilient to failures, providing a seamless experience for their users.
Have questions about ways to enhance and/or automate your servers’ patches? Find a time that works for you. Get started by filling out the pre-call form here.
