We’re proud to share some exciting news: Cloudar has achieved the AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) Competency—a recognition that highlights our deep expertise in helping SMBs leverage the power of AWS to grow, innovate, and compete in today’s fast-moving digital world.

For many small and medium-sized businesses, the cloud represents both an opportunity and a challenge. Limited resources, time constraints, and evolving customer demands make it critical to choose the right technology partner. That’s where we come in.

At Cloudar, we’ve built our reputation by delivering tailor-made, cost-effective, and scalable AWS solutions—with a strong focus on simplicity, security, and performance. Whether you’re a fast-growing startup or a well-established company looking to modernize, our local team of AWS-certified experts is here to guide you every step of the way.

Why This Competency Matters for You

Earning the AWS SMB Competency is more than just a badge. It confirms that Cloudar has a proven track record of helping SMBs:

• Optimize their IT infrastructure for flexibility and agility

• Reduce costs by leveraging right-sized cloud architectures

• Improve security and compliance, without the need for complex in-house solutions

• Scale operations efficiently as business needs evolve

Our customer-centric approach means we take the time to understand your business goals, not just your technical requirements. From initial strategy to hands-on implementation and ongoing support, we become a true extension of your team.

Real Results for Real Businesses

We’ve helped dozens of SMBs in the Benelux and beyond to transform their operations with AWS. From e-commerce platforms and SaaS providers to manufacturing and logistics companies, our clients trust us to deliver cloud environments that work—today and tomorrow.

Curious how we can support your journey? Take a look at some of the solutions we’ve delivered and the value they’ve created:

https://cloudar.be/services-solutions/services-for-small-and-medium-businesses/

The post Cloudar Achieves AWS SMB Competency appeared first on Cloudar.

At Cloudar, we’ve always believed that security should be at the heart of every cloud strategy. Our commitment to delivering top-notch cloud security solutions has led us to achieve numerous milestones, and today, we’re excited to announce our latest achievement: Cloudar has earned the prestigious AWS Security Competency!

Building on our ISO/IEC 27001 certification since 2018 and our existing AWS competencies, this accomplishment marks a significant milestone in our journey to provide the highest level of security and service to our customers. In this blog post, we’ll dive into what the AWS Security Competency means for us and, more importantly, what benefits it brings to our valued customers.

What is AWS Security Competency?

The AWS Security Competency is not just a fancy title; it’s a recognition of excellence in designing, implementing, and managing security solutions on the Amazon Web Services platform. AWS awards this competency to organizations that demonstrate exceptional proficiency in securing AWS workloads and infrastructure.

Why it matters

Expertise You Can Trust

Achieving the AWS Security Competency is a rigorous process that involves a deep evaluation of an organization’s expertise in various security domains such as identity and access management, data protection, compliance, and more.
This achievement is a seal of approval from Amazon Web Services itself.
It means that Cloudar’s team of experts possesses a comprehensive understanding of AWS security best practices, threat detection, and incident response. It signifies that we have demonstrated proficiency and skill in protecting your cloud infrastructure and data, giving you peace of mind that your assets are in capable hands.

Cutting-Edge Solutions

Our team at Cloudar stays at the forefront of security technology. Achieving the AWS Security Competency ensures that we are equipped with the latest knowledge and tools to keep your AWS environments secure from evolving threats.
Our partnership with Trend Micro played a crucial role in this accomplishment. Trend Micro is a global leader in cloud security, and our collaboration has allowed us to leverage their cutting-edge technology and expertise to enhance our security solutions. Together, we’ve created a formidable team dedicated to safeguarding our customers’ cloud environments.

Dedication to Continuous Improvement

Security is not a static field; it’s an ever-evolving landscape. To maintain this competency, Cloudar continues to invest in training and staying up-to-date with the latest security trends and technologies. We are committed to providing our customers with the most advanced security solutions available.

Proven Track Record

Our attainment of this competency underscores our extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing secure AWS solutions.
We understand that one-size-fits-all security solutions rarely work. Cloudar’s expertise allows us to tailor security measures to your unique needs, ensuring that your AWS environment is both secure and efficient. We’ve successfully tackled complex security challenges for customers across various industries, consistently delivering exceptional results.

Benefits for our customers

Compliance Assurance

As an ISO/IEC 27001 certified company, Cloudar understands the importance of compliance.
With Cloudar’s AWS Security Competency, you can trust us to help you meet and exceed regulatory compliance requirements. Our deep understanding of AWS services ensures that your cloud infrastructure aligns with industry-specific standards, making audits and certifications a breeze.

Enhanced Security Posture

With our AWS Security Competency and other AWS competencies, you gain access to top-tier security practices and expertise.
We go above and beyond to ensure your AWS environments are fortified against potential threats and vulnerabilities, significantly reducing the risk of data breaches and disruptions.

Cost Savings

Investing in security is an investment in your business’s longevity. By preventing costly breaches and downtime, Cloudar’s expertise can save you substantial financial resources in the long run.

Increased Efficiency

Our tailored security solutions are designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing AWS environment. This ensures that security measures do not impede your operations, allowing for increased efficiency and productivity.

Peace of Mind

In the event of a security incident, Cloudar’s well-practiced incident response teams are ready to spring into action. Our proactive security measures help mitigate threats before they become major issues, minimizing downtime and data loss.
With Cloudar as your trusted AWS Security Competency partner, you can focus on growing your business, knowing that your cloud infrastructure is fortified against threats. Sleep better at night, knowing that experts are on guard.

Conclusion

Achieving the AWS Security Competency is not just an accolade for Cloudar; it’s a testament to our unwavering dedication to providing the highest level of security for our customers’ AWS environments.

We are committed to keeping your data safe, your operations efficient, and your business thriving. Your cloud’s security is our priority, and together, we’ll reach new horizons.

To learn more about how Cloudar can secure your AWS environment and help your business grow securely, contact us today and experience the difference of working with an AWS Security Competency holder!

The post Elevating cloud security to new heights: Cloudar earns AWS Security Competency! appeared first on Cloudar.

#1 Develop a comprehensive strategy

Before deploying your applications on AWS, it is essential to establish a well-defined cybersecurity strategy. This strategy should include conducting a risk assessment, performing threat modelling, and devising a mitigation plan. Identify potential risks and vulnerabilities specific to your cloud infrastructure and implement measures to address them. This will ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations while proactively preventing cyberattacks.

#2 Become familiar with the AWS Well-Architected Framework

AWS offers abundant resources to help organizations enhance their security posture. The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides guidance for designing and operating secure and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The Framework encompasses five key pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. Understanding and leveraging the Framework is key to safeguarding applications against potential cyberthreats.

#3 Implement robust security controls

Taking proactive measures to impose strong cloud security controls is crucial for organizations to secure their AWS cloud infrastructure effectively. As the responsibility falls on you to protect your cloud workloads, consider implementing security controls to minimize the risk of security breaches, including clearly defining user roles, conducting privilege audits, enforcing a strong password policy, and using multi-factor authentication (MFA). Consistent enforcement and adherence to these security controls throughout your organization are essential.

#4 Ensure easy access to security policies

Accessibility to your AWS security policies is key to promoting a culture of security within your organization. These policies should encompass access control, network security, encryption, and incident response guidelines. Making policies accessible helps everyone in your organization understand the importance of security and act in accordance with your policies.

#5 Safeguard data with encryption

Encrypting your data prevents unauthorized access and ensures its confidentiality, even if intercepted or stolen. Encryption is often mandatory for regulatory compliance. AWS provides various encryption options, including server-side encryption, client-side encryption, and transit encryption. Familiarize yourself with these options and choose the appropriate method to secure your sensitive data within your cloud environment.

#6 Back up data consistently

Regular data backups ensure data integrity and availability. In the event of cyberattacks, hardware failures, or accidental deletions, having up-to-date backups provides peace of mind and enables data recovery. The frequency of backups should be based on the criticality and volatility of your data. Regulatory requirements and business needs will determine how long the data will be retained. AWS offers various backup options, such as Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and AWS Backup. By leveraging these options, you can store your backups in multiple regions to ensure constant protection.

#7 Stay up to date

AWS regularly releases security patches, bug fixes, and updates to address vulnerabilities and counter new threats. Keeping your AWS systems up to date maintains the security of your environment and protects against potential attacks. Take advantage of AWS’s automatic update features, such as Amazon Inspector and AWS Systems Manager, to automate patching and ensure your systems are always current. Configure notifications to receive alerts about new updates, enabling prompt action to stay ahead of security risks.

Want to optimally prepare your organization for cloud-related security threats? Get in touch with Cloudar, an official Next Generation AWS Managed Service Provider Partner.

The post Get it covered: 7 essential practices for AWS security appeared first on Cloudar.

Security is job zero

Our projects, customer base, headcount and specialties were growing like bamboo. Growth is a good thing, but it comes with some challenges. It was important for us to stay organized and efficient for many reasons, but above all to retain the highest level of information security. Because we’re big believers in, as AWS puts it: “Security is job zero.”

At the time, some customer projects were starting to require Cloudar to get ISO 27001 certified. This international standard for information security involves yearly audits, with a full audit every three years. Obtaining this certificate would also allow us to further expand our business.

It was around the same time that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force, replacing the 90’s Data Protection Directive. And while we were at it, we also wanted to achieve the AWS Managed Services Partner competency to further promote our business.

So we rolled up our sleeves and started working on getting AWS MSP, GDPR and ISO 27001, all at the same time. The goal: comply with all three, ASAP. And we did it! GDPR was done well before the deadline and by the end of 2018, we proudly announced that we had both certifications in the bag.

How we went about it

Before we started, we looked at the three different goals and identified the overlaps and dependencies:

For MSP, we structured the work into Jira tasks and created a Kanban overview to track progress. Each requirement referred to a page in Confluence where the content was written for the auditor to review.

For GDPR and ISO 27001, we engaged with InfoSentry, a Cronos company specialized in information security. Their experience and input proved to be very helpful for us to set up a usable Information Security Management System and Privacy Management System.

The following months were packed with writing policies and implementing improvements and procedures. It struck me that in many cases, the things we did and the way we did them were already in line with industry security and compliancy requirements. The whole exercise just confirmed that our way of working is quite secure. At the same time we gained new insight and structure that enable us to build on our strengths.

Leveraging our experience

Since we got multi certified, we’ve been leveraging our experience to help some of our customers on their information security journey. Whether you’re seeking insight into your current security status or looking to get ISO 27001 certified, we can help. Today, our company counts over 40 people. We just passed our recertification for ISO 27001. There were no non-conformities, just a single improvement opportunity. This kickass result is in line with our audit results from previous years. Our MSP recertification will follow soon, with even more achievements to come. I think that proves we can keep things organized, secure and fun at the same time. And we still rock!

The post Our journey to AWS Certification appeared first on Cloudar.

Having a centralized tool has many benefits. The most important one? Your team won’t have to cycle through several applications to manage dozens, if not hundreds of security alerts every day. It helps them to keep an overview and they will be less likely to miss anything important. You can even set up automated checks!

There are just a few things you need to keep in mind: the AWS Security Hub does not offer multi-region tracking at this time and only supports the following standards:

• CIS AWS Foundations
• AWS Foundational Security Best Practices
• Payment Card Industry Security Standard

If these current limitations are not a hang-up and if the AWS Security Hub fits your needs, it is an excellent and easy-to-set-up tool that will help you take control of your cybersecurity.

I’m ready to go. Where do I start?

When you start using AWS Security Hub, you will most likely be bombarded with alerts. It can be overwhelming, so a structured approach is essential when starting to tackle these issues. 

People seem to have a natural desire to annihilate their to-do lists and to reach a score of 100% as soon as possible. And while that may look good, it will impact your judgment if you let it.  

Instead, realize how important it is to have all this information neatly centralized in one tool. It’s perfectly fine to score less than 100%, as long as you are aware of all issues and create a timeline in which to tackle them. 

An example policy could be:

• Critical: resolve within 1 month
• High: resolve within 3 months
• Medium: resolve within 6 months
• Low: resolve within 12 months

Focus on one standard

It is counter-productive to try and deal with all standards at the same time. Is the PCI standard relevant to your business? No? Then leave it unchecked. 

Of all the standards you do have enabled in the AWS Security Hub, open the one with the worst score (spoiler alert: this is usually the CIS standard).

Once you are satisfied with the standard that requires the most work, you can look into any other standards in need of your attention.

First things first

Let’s start at the beginning. When you select the second tab in the app, you will only see “failed” controls. By default, this list is sorted by severity, with the most critical issues on top. 

Let’s focus on the Critical and High severity findings first. After that, you can work on the Medium and Low findings.

To successfully deal with security findings, follow these steps:

1. Read and understand what the finding is about. Follow the link to the AWS documentation for more details. Find out how many resources it affects (you will find this in the last column) to get an idea of the size, risk, and work to be done.
2. Decide on your next action and set the workflow status accordingly:
   1. Remediate (let me do it)
      Each finding description offers a link to documented remediation instructions. Once resolved, the finding will clear automatically after some time. Do you want it gone sooner? Sure thing. You can set the workflow status to “resolved” to clear the view immediately.
   2. Notify (not my problem)
      This workflow status is convenient to keep track of findings that are not your direct responsibility, but are of interest to you. You will still have to hand over the work to the right person, but it’s a nice way to stay in the loop.
   3. Suppress (shut up)
      Don’t overuse this one! Its purpose is to disable a check for a given resource. Be aware that if you ever disable and enable a standard again, the suppressed findings are reset. You should only use suppress when the check really has no added value for your situation.
      
      You could also completely disable a specific control for all current and future resources. It comes with a text field where you can enter the reason for disabling, which is very interesting for future reference.
      
      Why would you suppress a finding indefinitely? Here’s an example: if your company follows the CIS level 1 standard and only works with virtual MFA devices, control 1.14 (hardware MFA on root) is not necessary – as long as you do have virtual MFA on your root account. In that case, you can disable control 1.14.

Time to think ahead 

While it’s smart to look at the Critical and High severity findings first, it is possible that there are lower severity findings that pose a higher risk to your specific situation. 

Rifle through all findings to see if anything stands out. Look for findings that relate to your most critical instances first, for example. Guard Duty detected suspicious behavior? Investigate!

Lower severity findings typically come in a high number of similar or related issues. In many cases, these can be remediated with a rather low effort.

For example, you may receive dozens of findings about password requirements, one for each user. These can all be solved by applying an IAM password policy. MFA can be enforced through policies.

A missing CloudWatch configuration is another common cause of findings. You can deploy this script to configure the necessary metrics and alarms.

Last but not least

Once you have everything under control and your score reached a value to be proud of, you’re not done. Security never is.

Do you have all relevant standards enabled? Do you get recurring findings? Can you automate things? Did you suppress valid findings? Do you receive new findings each time you deploy new resources? Any 3rd party tools you can integrate with Security Hub?

As you can see, you can’t rest on your laurels when it comes to security. While a solid, centralized tool is half the battle, we also need you to stay on your toes. Good luck!

The post Security Hope appeared first on Cloudar.