Benefits of CloudTrail

The benefits of CloudTrail are unique to an organization’s AWS environment, but it can boost visibility and enhance operations and security within each platform.

Compliance — the recording and storing of event logs in S3 buckets make it easier to comply with requirements for maintaining records of activity. With the integration of CloudWatch logs, you can also enable automatic detection of events that break compliance, reducing incident response time.

Visibility — event logs of API calls and actions in the management console offer insight into user and resource activity, providing details such as accounts, source IP addresses, and timestamps. Log management and analytics solutions can be fed these logs to detect anomalous user behavior and perform security analysis.

Troubleshooting — being able to view changes to the configuration of your AWS resources within a specified time period (such as modifications of a security group via API calls) enhances troubleshooting of security and operational issues.

Automated security — by integrating CloudTrail with CloudWatch, you can automatically execute predefined processes when CloudTrail detects certain events. For example, if CloudTrail records an API call that makes an S3 bucket public, CloudWatch can automatically detect that change and trigger a process to revert it.

Resource provisioning — CloudTrail Insights enable you to detect and adapt to unusual behavior before it becomes an issue. The response can even be automated by integrating AWS Lambda functions to scale or reprovision resources.

It's important not to rely exclusively on CloudTrail for security purposes such as logging, log analysis, or automated security via integrations. Redundancy is key in security, and this practice can be instilled by using CloudTrail in combination with external security tools which are specialized in each of the areas that CloudTrail covers.