Building a Cloud Security Strategy with AWS Native Tools

Are you an Amazon Web Services customer looking to build a cloud security strategy? If so, you’ve got an array of choices. Learn about their strengths and gaps — and why you need to augment them with a CNAPP like Tenable Cloud Security.

If you're a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and you're looking to build a cloud security strategy, your natural starting point is probably leveraging the provider’s own service offerings. AWS certainly offers a rich suite of native capabilities to help you establish foundational security, monitor threats and meet compliance requirements. But if you're looking to scale and support a dynamic environment, you'll soon start to have some challenges. This is where cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) like Tenable Cloud Security offer critical value.

This article is a guide for cloud security practitioners looking to build a foundational security strategy using AWS native tools. We explore what to look out for, especially if you're trying to protect multi-cloud, identity and context-rich scenarios.

We discuss:

• The core AWS native security services
• Where AWS native tools fall short
• What you can achieve by using a CNAPP to augment native tools

Core AWS native security services and how to use them

AWS provides a wide array of tools that span identity, detection, configuration and data protection.

When starting out with your cloud adoption, there’s nothing more natural than employing these tools to implement security principles.

In the following section we cover the main tools offered and what they can be used for.

Identity and access management (IAM)

• AWS IAM: Define fine-grained access control by creating policies, roles and user groups. Best practices include enforcing least privilege, using role-based access control and avoiding the use of root accounts. Use IAM roles for service-to-service communication.
• AWS IAM Access Analyzer: Helps detect unintended external sharing of your resources. It analyzes IAM and resource-based policies attached to resources like Simple Storage Service (S3), IAM roles and Lambda functions to surface risky access paths. In addition, Access Analyzer has some really interesting features such as the ability to generate least privilege policies on-demand based on cloud trail activity.
• AWS IAM Access Advisor: Helps identify unused permissions by showing the last accessed time for each AWS service that a user or role has been allowed to use.
• AWS Organizations: Enable centralized governance by applying guardrails across accounts. Allows applying Service Control Policies (SCPs) and Resource Based Policies (RCPs) that enforce maximum permission boundaries which may be granted to identities in accounts or applied to resources within accounts, respectively.

Network security

• Security Groups and Network Access Control Lists (ACLs): Implement virtual firewalls to control inbound/outbound traffic at the instance or subnet level. Security Groups are stateful, Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) are stateless. Regularly audit open ports and restrict to known IP ranges.
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow Logs: Capture IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. Useful for troubleshooting, forensic analysis and anomaly detection.
• AWS Network Firewall / AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF):
  • Network Firewall: Deploy at the VPC level for deeper packet inspection and layer-7 filtering.
  • AWS WAF: Apply at CloudFront or API Gateway to protect web apps from common OWASP threats.

Data protection

• AWS Key Management Service (KMS): Use customer-managed (CMKs) or Amazon managed keys to encrypt data at rest in services like S3, Relational Database Service (RDS), Elastic Block Storage (EBS). You can set automatic key rotation and audit key usage via CloudTrail.
• Amazon Macie: Automatically classifies and protects sensitive data in S3 by using machine learning. Detects personally identifiable information (PII), financial data and credentials. Integrates with Security Hub for centralized alerts.
• S3 Block Public Access: Globally enforce rules to prevent any public exposure of S3 buckets, objects or access points.

Threat detection and monitoring

• Amazon GuardDuty: Continuously monitors CloudTrail logs, VPC flow logs and DNS logs to detect threats. It provides findings like reconnaissance activity, compromised instances and account anomalies. Easy to enable across accounts.
• Amazon Inspector: Automatically scans Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and container images for vulnerabilities. Now supports Elastic Container Registry (ECR) for container vulnerability scans. Helps identify outdated packages and CVEs.
• AWS Security Hub: Aggregates security findings from multiple AWS services (GuardDuty, Macie, Inspector) and AWS Partner tools. Provides a unified dashboard and allows you to run compliance checks (e.g., CIS benchmarks).
• CloudTrail and CloudWatch:
  • CloudTrail: Logs all API calls for account activity auditing.
  • CloudWatch: Monitors metrics, logs, and sets alarms for operational and security events. Use CloudWatch Logs Insights for real-time search and analytics.

Configuration management and posture

• AWS Config: Continuously monitors AWS resource configurations. Use managed rules (or custom ones) to check for security violations like open security groups or unencrypted volumes.
• AWS Trusted Advisor: Scans your AWS environment for cost optimization, performance and security recommendations. Highlights unused resources and overly permissive access.

Where AWS native security tools fall short

It's clear that AWS demonstrates a strong commitment to security, evidenced by the suite of native security solutions it offers. Many of these tools, such as KMS for encryption, are significant and readily available, allowing for the application of security best practices from the start.

However, despite these valuable native offerings, as environments scale and mature, there are certain situations where the AWS solutions may not suffice. Specifically, when you want to build a holistic strategy for your cloud security — especially as part of a bigger picture cybersecurity and exposure management practice for your entire tech stack — they could feel like discrete building blocks. Putting them together is not a trivial feat.

Consequently, in some cases, these native tools could be augmented or even replaced (to avoid duplication) by dedicated solutions, as we will explore in the next section.

Listed below are a few examples:

Limited multi-cloud and hybrid visibility

• AWS tools are deeply integrated with AWS, but are not natively integrated with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and SaaS applications.
• Many organizations operate in multi-cloud or hybrid setups and require a unified view and central analysis.

Siloed tools with fragmented context

• Each AWS security tool has its own dashboard and alerting system.
• Security Hub aggregates findings but lacks the deep correlation and risk prioritization of a CNAPP.

Partial identity risk visibility

• IAM Access Analyzer only looks at policy logic, not real-world privilege escalation paths.
• When it comes to generating replacement policies, Access Analyzer has its limitations; notably not performing action-level analysis for all services, or based on data events (per AWS documentation). Plus, while generating least privilege policy on demand is very impressive — there are quotas that apply to it, so you can’t use it on all identities, and definitely not all the time. In addition, the policies generated would usually still require editing before being used, so they can’t be applied out-of-the-box.
• No native support for mapping effective permissions across accounts and services.
• There are several use cases, such as looking into third-party permissions and having visibility into the effective permissions of federated identities, which are still not supported out-of-the-box.
• In order to achieve continuous monitoring of the kind of access all identities have — and understanding the risk from them — you have to invest a lot in operationalizing these tools, which could perhaps involve significant cost (see next section).

Lacking Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

• Macie focuses on S3, but lacks holistic data classification and context.
• You can’t map sensitive data access paths through identities or public exposure out-of-the-box.

Context-aware risk prioritization is missing

• Native tools lack an attacker’s-eye view. They don’t correlate exploitable paths from external access through misconfigured roles to sensitive data.
• In addition, when you want to parse the input from such tools to your overall exposure management practice, you still have to do a lot of the leg work.

On top of these — there’s another significant factor to keep in mind when employing such a strategy at scale: Cost.

Unpredictable, fragmented and significant cost structure

While AWS native tools may seem cost-effective at first, the reality is that their pricing is fragmented across services and often buried in fine print.

Many services, like GuardDuty, Macie, Inspector and IAM Access Analyzer charge per object analyzed, per GB of logs, or per resource monitored.

This creates a situation where security costs can scale uncontrollably without clear visibility, making budgeting difficult.

For example, as cloud expert Matt Fuller noted on X, IAM Access Analyzer’s custom analyzers can cost $9/month per resource — a surprise to many unaware of the detailed pricing model.

In many organizations, the cost governance for cloud infrastructure is centralized and is not typically handled by the security team. This makes controlling the cost across these various security tools challenging. Sprawl can easily occur and the organization may be blindsided by charges.

Augmenting native security tools with a CNAPP – Why Tenable Cloud Security?

Tenable Cloud Security offers a CNAPP that addresses the above limitations while complementing native AWS tools. Here's how:

Holistic exposure management

Tenable Cloud Security integrates seamlessly with Tenable's broader exposure management platform, allowing organizations to consolidate cloud security findings with vulnerabilities from IT, operational technology (OT) and web applications. This provides a truly unified view of cyber risk across the entire attack surface, helping security teams prioritize and remediate the exposures that matter most.

Unified, multi-cloud visibility

You gain a single view of assets, configurations and risks across AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes. This unified 'single pane of glass' approach provides security practitioners with comprehensive visibility, reducing the need for deep, specialized expertise in each individual cloud environment. By aggregating relevant data sources from across your cloud ecosystems, Tenable Cloud Security provides contextual and enriched information to drive effective risk management, exposure management and vulnerability management, while also alleviating tool sprawl.

Extending familiar vulnerability management to the cloud

For existing Tenable Vulnerability Management customers, Tenable Cloud Security offers a significant advantage by extending Tenable's trusted and reliable vulnerability assessment to your cloud workloads.

This means you can assess all your workloads across cloud and on-prem environments with the same UI and UX, ensuring consistent data and a unified view of vulnerabilities across your entire attack surface.

This integration simplifies vulnerability management for hybrid environments and leverages your existing investment and expertise in Tenable.

Identity and entitlement risk analysis

Tenable Cloud Security performs effective permission analysis across accounts, services and federated roles with its cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) component so you can:

• Analyze third-party access to the cloud as well as the effective permissions of federated identities.
• Detect privilege escalation paths, inactive accounts with access to sensitive data and toxic permission combinations.
• Most importantly: these actions can be done at scale, automatically, at reasonable cost for all the identities in your environment.

Finally, Tenable Cloud Security also supports augmenting its CIEM ability with a just-in-time access platform, allowing you to provide zero standing permissions to cloud environments and SaaS applications; you can provide access only when it’s specifically needed.

Contextual risk prioritization

• Tenable uses attack path analysis to identify real-world exploitable chains across the various domains relevant to cloud environments — ensuring cloud security is not managed through siloed, discrete tools, but in one unified platform.
• Crucially, Tenable Cloud Security supports the realization, acknowledgement and detection of attack paths that pivot across different ecosystems, with the understanding that cyber adversaries do not operate in silos. For example, it can flag: “An EC2 instance with a public IP, that has a misconfigured role allowing access to S3 buckets with sensitive PII.”
• In addition, Tenable Cloud Security feeds into the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, allowing you to holistically manage exposure.

Integrated DSPM capabilities

• Automatically discover sensitive data across cloud environments, not just S3.
• Map data access paths and correlate with IAM and network risks.

DevSecOps and infrastructure as code (IaC) security

• Scan Terraform, CloudFormation and Kubernetes manifests before deployment.
• Integrate into CI/CD pipelines and block risky code before it hits production.

Remediation guidance and automation

• Tenable not only finds issues but also gives precise, actionable fixes.
• Supports remediation as code and integrates with ticketing and workflow tools.

How to combine AWS native tools with Tenable Cloud Security

Just as CNAPP tools don’t replace configuration and encryption tools such as IAM and KMS, so, too, employing a CNAPP isn’t meant to replace all AWS tools. Rather, it’s an opportunity to layer CNAPP capabilities on top for added risk reduction. Here’s how to approach it:

Use AWS for enforcement, Tenable for visibility

• Let Service Control Policies (SCPs), Resource Control Policies (RCPs) and Config Rules act as enforcers.
• Let Tenable identify misconfigurations, escalation paths and residual risk.

Ingest AWS logs and configurations into Tenable

• Integrate your AWS accounts to Tenable Cloud Security to allow it to ingest its configurations, CloudTrail logs, etc.

Prioritize fixes intelligently

• Use Tenable’s risk scoring to decide what to fix first instead of drowning in dozens of Security Hub findings.

Close the DevSecOps loop

• Pair AWS native CodePipeline tools with Tenable’s IaC scanning to stop misconfigurations before they reach runtime.

Elevate reporting

• Use Tenable’s dashboards to communicate posture to leadership with context-rich, executive-friendly visuals.

Conclusion: Native cloud security tools aren’t enough on their own

AWS provides an impressive and essential foundation for securing workloads — but it’s just that: a foundation. You need to go beyond isolated alerts and compliance checks to understand how threats manifest in real-world scenarios. Without correlating identities, network exposure, data sensitivity and misconfigurations, it’s hard to prioritize what matters.

That’s where Tenable Cloud Security shines. As a CNAPP, it bridges the gap between visibility and action, context and prioritization, policy and enforcement. For cloud practitioners already using AWS tools, adding Tenable isn't a replacement — it’s the next step toward mature, scalable and risk-aware cloud security.

Start by integrating Tenable Cloud Security into your existing AWS setup today — and gain the clarity you need to secure tomorrow’s cloud.

Want to see how Tenable Cloud Security can give you deeper insights into your AWS environment? Request a demo.