Siemens improve security and collaboration with AWS

As a global technology company, Siemens has internal data to manage from its teams and over 300,000 employees all over the world. A team of seven security analysts and engineers make up the Digital Industries Software (DISW) software-as-a-service (SaaS) security team, looking after 300 accounts across 30 internal groups and previously processed this data manually.

Realising that this wasn’t the most efficient or secure way of doing things, last year the company invested in a suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the security team.

Scott Schwartz, senior infrastructure engineer at Siemens said: “We wanted to have centralised access to all of our information. We wanted to aggregate it from accounts across the organisation and integrate it with all of our tools.”

Integrating the team’s existing software, including security information and event management tool Splunk, the team were able to migrate to the new suite with ease.

Schwartz said: “It was simple to build an integration that pulls data from numerous sources, including AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty, into Splunk. Being able to use AWS services with existing tools was a big win.”

Increased visibility and automation have also been important to Siemens and, with AWS, the team now have detailed logging and notification capabilities whereby they are notified almost instantaneously if unexpected activity is detected. “The team members have more knowledge and experience now, and they can make 95 per cent of these determinations themselves,” added Schwartz.

As communication and knowledge have been improved, using the new system has meant that the security team have been able to work better with other teams across the company, with Schwartz saying : “Where there used to be friction when we worked on other teams’ security, there’s now collaboration."

The team are now looking to give the development and operational divisions the same access to AWS Security Hub findings, as well as seeing how they can utilise AWS more across the rest of the company: “There are so many services and features on AWS that you can continually learn and improve,” concluded Schwartz. “It’s great as a customer to have access to that breadth of services.”