Secure Your Oracle Applications on AWS: an MSP Perspective

As more businesses migrate their legacy Oracle Applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS), an in-depth knowledge of the AWS shared responsibility model for security and compliance has become of paramount importance for the Managed Services Provider (MSP), as it is the MSP’s responsibility to address security at the operating system, network, platform and applications level. The MSP must be an expert in securing the applications, especially Oracle Applications.

Why is security traditionally so hard?

Security has been and continues to be an ongoing challenge for Chief Information Officers (CIO) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISO). They have had poor visibility into their infrastructure and their workloads. They have had to invest countless amounts of time and money to keep the data in their applications secure and they end up with very little automation. Here are some reasons why:

• Legacy security tools are complicated to use, difficult to deploy, and expensive to manage. Plus, these tools do not understand the dynamic nature of the cloud.
• There is a serious lack of human expertise in this field. It is difficult to find qualified candidates and they are expensive and hard to retain.
• Threat intelligence and security content is a big deal. How do you identify an attack? How do you know you have the right data to find an attack? How do you differentiate between normal traffic and an actual attack?

Meanwhile, security requirements continue to evolve. Compliance standards and regulations continue to get more stringent and data volumes keep growing and becoming more business critical. In the early cloud days, companies were forced to choose between “Do you want to be fast, nimble, and agile?” or “Do you want to be secure?” Now you can do both.

Security at Amazon Web Services

Although traditional security principles still apply, with the adoption of Cloud technologies, a different approach defined by AWS has emerged – the Shared Security and Compliance Model.

This cloud model dictates that the customer is responsible for all system security above the hypervisor. AWS relieves the customer from the hardware and physical infrastructure security responsibilities. AWS regularly achieves third-party validations for thousands of global compliance requirements. Your business will inherit the latest security controls operated by AWS, which strengthens your own business’s security programs.

We at Apps Associates, as a certified MSP for AWS, assume the security responsibility on behalf of our customers with our Managed Services offering.

The complexity of the application stack

Oracle Applications have a complex technical stack with multiple options of architecture deployment. Simple highly available and Maximum Availability Architectures (MAA) are commonplace when deploying Oracle Applications, adding to the vulnerable areas that require an expert level of application knowledge to secure them.

The importance of the MSP’s application expertise

Our experience with Oracle workloads started with the company’s founding as a professional services firm centered on Oracle specialization and as an early cloud adopter and service provider with Amazon Web Services since 2012. This experience has led to the development of a layered approach to Managed Services. Our integrated MSP solution is comprised of processes, procedures, tools and best practices specifically tailored for the Oracle environments and leveraging our Oracle expertise. Recently, Apps Associates has formed a partnership with Alert Logic to embed its tools and services as part of our MSP package, providing a best-of-breed solution for cloud-based environments. This tightly integrated approach to security, together with Amazon Web Services and Alert Logic, is ideal for the most comprehensive security and compliance protection. It is built upon the foundation of Amazon Web Services’ global security and compliance controls and their market leading security and privacy standards. It expands with the addition of Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service for proactive protection.

While you focus on your business, our expert engineers with deep Oracle expertise will be working in the background as part of our MSP practice to build and deliver security with the latest updates.

So how do you get started?

Get started with us. Apps Associates was founded and remains a company that helps businesses to plan, implement, and manage their Oracle Applications and related technologies including cross-platform, hybrid integration, analytics, and infrastructure. We support the complete stack from the infrastructure to the application layer, whether on-premises or in the cloud. If you would like more information, watch this webinar replay and let’s talk.