Simplify and Secure AWS Access to Accelerate Outcomes: 3 Best Practices

Companies may scale their cloud resources in pursuit of product, cost, or process innovation. However, this does not come without a cost of its own.

The resulting infrastructure complexity, created from a growing sprawl of access silos, can introduce friction into engineer and security workflows. This complexity impacts productivity and increases management overhead, which may inadvertently promote unsecure access methods and increase the likelihood of misconfigurations or human error – increasing the risk of security incidents and complicating compliance objectives.

Fortunately, there are strategies companies can utilize to keep secure infrastructure access scaling alongside cloud infrastructure, even as it expands exponentially. In this blog post, we will explore three best practices to simplify and secure infrastructure access, streamline development, and ease compliance burdens across growing AWS environments.

But first, let us examine the challenges most closely associated with maintaining security and productivity across AWS environments as they scale.

The impact on engineering and infrastructure teams

Organizations meticulously monitor cloud utilization and associated costs for compute and storage, but they often overlook the hidden costs of managing access and security controls. These costs are significant – and not just from an overhead perspective.

Improperly managed infrastructure access across expanding cloud resources can generate burdensome engineering friction, complicating access to critical development resources and slowing down time to market objectives – all while requiring valuable management overhead to configure and maintain.

Your teams spend valuable time manually controlling access to a dynamic and diverse set of resources – including databases, Kubernetes clusters, and EC2 instances – that are spun up and down based on demand. Each instance requires careful configuration to ensure no unchecked access paths are left exposed, as even a small oversight could result in a costly breach. While critical, this process is tedious, repetitive, and limits your team’s ability to focus on innovative new projects – ultimately leading to increased overhead and opportunity costs. Multiply this effort by the number of teams and the frequency that resources change, and the cumulative impact is staggering.

But the impact of cloud expansion is not strictly limited to productivity – there is a very serious security implication that can impact your organization’s security posture. Access is often the first line of defense against incidents, intrusions, or abuse. As cloud infrastructure expands and cloud workloads grow more critical to the business, this growing attack surface resulting from insufficiently managed or heavily siloed access can spell catastrophe.

Maintaining consistent access controls across everything is an all-too-real cloud cost that may not appear on an invoice, but has an outsized impact on business resilience, time to market, and compliance – all of which impact your organization's bottom line.

Best practices to simplify and secure AWS infrastructure access

These challenges (though often unavoidable) are not unsolvable. There are several strategies organizations can employ to more efficiently secure access across expanding AWS infrastructure, maintain tighter control over access and provisioning, and increase visibility and audit capabilities across distributed cloud workloads.

By doing so, you can drastically reduce the overhead costs associated with managing access controls across cloud infrastructure – and, more importantly, accelerate the speed at which developers, engineers, and infrastructure teams are able to complete their work.

1. Reduce manual configuration with dynamic discovery and permissions

Combatting infrastructure sprawl is no easy feat. As AWS environments grow in scale and complexity, manually managing access controls can quickly become a time suck that requires significant human overhead. By unifying access controls across the entirety of your environment, you ensure the right people have the right level of access at the exact right time without requiring additional human effort.

Teleport’s dynamic resource discovery allows teams to automatically explore AWS RDS databases, EC2 instances, and Kubernetes clusters. For example, when new databases are provisioned, Teleport can automatically identify and configure them, eliminating the need for manual updates or configuration changes. By centralizing access control and ensuring resources are configured in real-time, organizations reduce overhead and allow their teams to focus on core development efforts.

In the words of one system administrator, “We didn’t want to manually manage config information for our many dozens of databases. [A] significant amount of overhead would be involved with manually configuring those databases… Teleport's auto-discovery feature saved us.”

2. Enforce RBAC and just-in-time permissions

Role-based access control (RBAC) is one of the most effective ways to ensure individual users and teams only have access to the resources they need. By integrating identity-aware access controls into AWS infrastructure, you can define access policies based on roles, ensuring that users have permissions appropriate to their responsibilities.

AWS offers a wide range of services – each with its own access needs. Managing access to resources like EC2 instances, EKS clusters, databases (RDS, Aurora, Redshift), and serverless services can be complex at an enterprise scale. Implementing granular, resource-specific access controls can help reduce your organization's attack surface and improve the overall security of your environment, limiting the potential blast radius of attacks and exerting heightened control over provisioning.

For example, you might need to configure resource-specific or role-based access for:

• EC2 instances: Fine-grained access policies may be needed to precisely manage who can access Linux vs. Windows instances, and who can provision new EC2 instances.
• Databases (RDS, Aurora, Redshift): Table-level access controls may help ensure that only authorized individuals can query or modify sensitive databases.
• Kubernetes clusters (EKS): Granular, dynamic permissions may be necessary for managing Kubernetes clusters vs. the workloads running inside them. This can ensure developers or admins are able to control cluster provisioning while also limiting access to sensitive application data.

Teleport enables fine-grained RBAC for AWS resources, ensuring each team member has exactly the access they need – no more, no less. With just-in-time privilege escalation, even temporary access can be granted securely and automatically revoked after a set duration.

For instance, contractors needing database access for maintenance can request time-limited access, which is logged for auditing purposes. This minimizes standing permissions and eliminates potential risks without slowing down critical operations.

3. Unify access visibility, reporting, and alerting

To stay ahead of tightening compliance requirements, organizations must not only enforce rigorous access controls but also maintain thorough audit trails. This can require significant overhead and incur additional costs – though nothing compared to the costs and reputational damage of non-compliance. To ease the overhead burden, organizations should prioritize the implementation of automated reporting and alerting on access events and activity – helping identify unauthorized access or configuration changes as they happen, ensuring that security teams can respond quickly.

Access within AWS infrastructure should be properly alerted on and logged, including events like:

• Suspicious activities: Any actions that may fall outside of normal behavior, such as consecutive failed login attempts, sudden privilege escalation requests, or atypical access to sensitive resources.
• Non-compliant access: Instances where access is granted outside of defined security policies. Or, when compliance configurations (e.g., the use of encryption) are violated.
• Access to critical resources: Activity within sensitive or business-critical resources. These alerts should have high priority and be able to cut through monitoring noise.

Teleport’s unified logging and audit capabilities provide a real-time, centralized view of who accessed what, when, and how. These logs integrate seamlessly with AWS CloudTrail and other compliance tools, making it easier for teams to collect and correlate audit data to meet regulatory requirements and respond to security incidents. Dynamic logging ensures that organizations can always prove compliance while providing their engineers with the flexibility they need to work efficiently.

The business impact of Teleport for AWS

Secure access at scale

Beyond eliminating access complexity across AWS infrastructure, Teleport’s zero trust approach bolsters your AWS security posture, shrinks your attack surface, and makes it simpler to meet compliance and audit requirements with features including:

• Total elimination of secrets: Shared and static credentials like passwords, SSH keys, and tokens are no longer needed, reducing your attack surface.
• Identity-based attack protection: The enforcement of zero trust and least privilege principles removes standing privilege risks and reduces the potential impact of an identity-related breach.
• Comprehensive compliance data: Sessions, changes, transfers, and other security events are collected and logged in a structured audit trail.

Accelerated time to market

By streamlining access to AWS infrastructure with Teleport, organizations can quickly improve developer productivity and time to market with benefits including:

• Accelerated onboarding: New team members can start contributing sooner with secure, automated access to the resources they need based on their role.
• Developer productivity: Engineers spend less time managing credentials or waiting for access approvals, freeing them to focus on building and delivering features.
• Reduced risk of compromise: Nothing slows development like a breach. Unified access controls and audit trails minimize the potential for misconfigurations and abuse.

Reduced management costs

Proving and maintaining compliance takes a lot of effort – and can incur additional costs. Teleport’s unified approach collects and structures audit and compliance data across even the most complex infrastructure environments, leading to:

• Streamlined management: Automated resource discovery, scalable controls, and unified visibility reduces management overhead and lightens infrastructure team workloads.
• Simpler auditing and compliance: Detailed logging, recording, and granular access controls reduce the overhead and costs often required to procure audit and compliance data.
• Reduced shadow IT: Unified visibility into access across infrastructure helps keep tighter inventory over resource utilization and reduces the costs and risks incurred from shadow utilization.

For businesses striving to bring products to market faster, secure and efficient AWS access isn’t just an operational need – it’s a strategic advantage. By adopting tools like Teleport, organizations ensure that access controls scale in step with infrastructure growth while enabling teams to innovate – and without compromising security or compliance objectives.

Conclusion: Simplify and secure access. Accelerate outcomes.

As the cloud continues to drive business growth, ensuring secure, efficient access to AWS infrastructure is more critical than ever. Teleport’s identity-first, zero-trust approach transforms AWS access from a potential bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

By reducing manual effort, enforcing granular controls, and providing complete visibility, organizations can accelerate their time to market – empowering engineers to focus on what matters most: delivering value to customers.

Another critical component to securing and simplifying your AWS ecosystem? Implementing zero trust. Read our white paper to discover strategies for implementing zero trust security across your expanding AWS infrastructure with Teleport.

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