Hybrid Threat Protection with Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Powered by AWS
IT security teams need to have a real-time understanding of what’s happening with their infrastructure and applications. They need to be able to find and correlate data in this continuous flood of information to identify unexpected behaviors or patterns that can lead to a security breach. Many years ago these two approaches were merged to address both information analysis and interpretation of events. These security information and event management (SIEM) platforms provide real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications, network hardware, and domain specific security tools such as firewalls and endpoint protection tools).
To simplify and automate this process, many solutions have been implemented over the years.
Today, I’d like to introduce a solution created by one of our partners: Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM powered by AWS. Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM provides deep security analytics and contextualized threat data across hybrid environments to reduce the time to detect and respond to threats. You can use this solution to quickly detect and respond to the higher-priority issues, including malicious activities that negatively impact your business or brand. The solution comes with more than 300 out-of-the-box integrations, including key AWS services, and can help reduce time and effort required to conduct compliance audits for regulations such as PCI and HIPPA.
Build a workflow using Workflow Studio
Imagine that you need to build a system that validates data when an account is created. If the input data is correct, the system saves the record in persistent storage and an email is sent to the administrator to confirm the account was created successfully. If the account cannot be created due to a validation error, the data is not stored and an email is sent to notify the administrator that there was a problem with the creation of the account.
There are many ways to solve this problem, but if you want to make the application with the least amount of code, and take advantage of all the managed services that AWS provides, you should use Workflow Studio to design the state machine and build the integrations with all the managed services.
You can start creating state machines in Workflow Studio. In the left pane, the States Browser, you can view and search the available actions and flow states. Actions are operations you can perform using AWS services, like invoking an AWS Lambda function, making a request with Amazon API Gateway, and sending a message to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. Flows are the state types you can use to make a workflow appropriate for your use case.
- Choice: Adds if-then-else logic.
- Parallel: Adds parallel branches.
- Map: Adds a for-each loop.
- Wait: Delays for a specific time.
Configure the Lambda function
The first step in your workflow is the Lambda function. To add it to your state machine, just drag an Invoke action from the Actions list into the center of Workflow Studio, as shown in step 1. You can edit the configuration of your function in the right pane. For example, you can change the name (as shown in step 2). You can also edit which Lambda function should be invoked from the list of functions deployed in this account, as shown in step 3. When you’re done, you can edit the output for this task,
Validate Accounts Data
Configuring the output of the task is very important, because these values will be passed to the next state as input. We will construct a result object with just the information we need (in this case, if the account is valid). First, clear Filter output with OutputPath, as shown in step 1. Then you can select Transform result with Result Selector, and add the JSON shown in step 2. Then, to combine the input of this current state with the output, and send it to the next state as input, select Combine input and result with ResultPath, as shown in step 3. We need the input of this state, because the input is the account information. If the validation is successful, we need to store that data in a DynamoDB table.
