Trend Vision One™ Integration with AWS Security Hub CSPM: Unifying Cloud Security
3. Real-World Use Cases
3.1 Unified Security View
Situation: Your company has 50 EC2 instances distributed across multiple AWS accounts. You use Vision One for malware protection, GuardDuty to detect suspicious behavior, and Inspector to find vulnerabilities.
The Problem Before: Your security team needed to check three different dashboards, multiple times a day, to get a complete picture of the situation.
The Solution with Integration: Now, everything appears in one place – AWS Security Hub CSPM. When Vision One detects malware on an EC2 instance, the alert appears alongside GuardDuty and Inspector notifications. Your team has a complete view and can prioritize what’s most critical.
Practical Example: Imagine that at 10:30 AM, Vision One detects a trojan on an instance. The alert appears immediately in Security Hub CSPM with all relevant information:
- Which instance was affected
- What type of malware was found
- The severity level (High, Medium, Low)
- Recommendations on how to resolve the problem
3.2 Automated Threat Response
Scenario: Amazon Inspector discovers a critical vulnerability in one of your EC2 instances – a serious security flaw that could be exploited by attackers.
The Automated Flow:
- Detection: Inspector identifies the vulnerability and sends the alert to Security Hub CSPM
- Analysis: The integration verifies if the instance has the Vision One agent installed
- Notification: Your team receives an alert informing that protection has been applied and that definitive remediation should be scheduled
The Benefit: You gain precious time. Instead of being vulnerable for hours or days, protection is applied in seconds, reducing the exposure window.
3.3 Simplified Compliance and Auditing
For companies that need to demonstrate compliance with regulations such as PCI DSS, LGPD, or GDPR, the integration offers significant advantages:
- Complete Traceability: All security events are recorded in a single place, with precise timestamps and detailed information. When an auditor asks, “What happened on day X?”, you have all the answers in a consolidated report.
- Evidence of Continuous Protection: The integration automatically documents that you have active 24/7 monitoring, that security findings are responded to quickly, and that vulnerabilities are treated systematically.
- Ready-Made Reports: Security Hub CSPM offers compliance dashboards that come pre-configured with major security frameworks. With the integration, Vision One data automatically feeds these reports.
4. Expanding to Complex Environments
4.1 Multiple AWS Accounts and Regions
Many organizations manage several AWS accounts, typically separating environments such as production, development, and testing. They also operate across multiple geographic regions to improve performance, ensure compliance, and enhance resilience.
The Hub-and-Spoke Architecture: Think of this as a radial network system, where there’s a central account (the “hub”) and several connected accounts (the “spokes”):
- Main Account (Hub): Receives all security alerts from all other accounts
- Secondary Accounts (Spokes): Send their alerts to the main account
- Vision One: Connects to the main account, obtaining complete visibility of everything
Practical Benefit: Your security analyst doesn’t need to log into 10 different accounts. They access a single dashboard and see everything happening across the entire organization.
4.2 Intelligent Alert Filtering
Not every alert needs to be visible in every system or dashboard. This integration enables you to define intelligent filtering rules so that alerts are routed where they matter most. Example Rules:
- By Severity: “Only send alerts of Medium severity or higher to Security Hub CSPM”
- By Environment: “Alerts from development environments don’t need to appear on the main dashboard”
- By Type: “Network scan attempts are expected in test environments, don’t generate alerts”
The Code Allows Customization: Since the project is open source, you can adapt the filtering logic to your specific needs. For example, you can add rules based on:
- Time (alerts outside business hours can have different treatment)
- Resource tags (instances marked as “critical” always generate alerts)
- History (if the same threat appeared 5 times and was always a false positive, stop alerting)
4.3 Monitoring the Integration Itself
Monitoring your applications is important, but monitoring the integration itself is just as critical. You need to ensure alerts are flowing correctly.Amazon CloudWatch – Your Observatory: Amazon CloudWatch allows you to create visualizations and alerts about the integration itself:
- How many alerts were sent today?
- Are any errors occurring?
- Is response time within expectations?
Monitoring Example: You can configure to receive a notification if:
- No alerts from Vision One reach Security Hub CSPM for more than 1 hour (may indicate the integration stopped working)
- Error rate exceeds 5% (something is wrong with communication)
- Processing time exceeds 30 seconds (there may be slowness)
5. Practical Tips and Lessons Learned
5.1 Start Small, Expand Gradually
Recommendation: Don’t try to implement everything at once across all accounts. Start with a pilot project:
- Week 1: Configure the integration in a test account with few instances
- Week 2-3: Observe behavior, adjust filters, familiarize your team
- Week 4: Expand to less critical production environments
- Month 2: Complete rollout to the entire organization
Benefit: You learn from mistakes in a controlled environment, avoiding production impacts.
5.2 Document Your Customizations
The GitHub project is an excellent starting point, but you’ll inevitably make adjustments for your reality:
Keep a Record:
- What filters you added and why
- Which alerts were configured differently from the standard
- Changes to permissions and roles
- Custom automated response logic
Why This Matters: When someone new joins the team, or when you need to replicate the configuration in another region, having this documentation saves hours of work.
5.3 Security First
It may seem ironic, but when implementing a security solution, you need to ensure the solution itself is secure!
Credential Protection: Never, under any circumstances, leave your API keys visible in code or configuration files. Use AWS Secrets Manager to store them securely. Think of it as keeping your house keys in a safe, not under the doormat.
Regular Rotation: Just as you periodically change your email password, do the same with API keys. Configure automatic rotation every 90 days. AWS Secrets Manager can do this automatically for you.
Principle of Least Privilege: The AWS Lambda functions that perform the integration should have only the strictly necessary permissions. It’s like giving the pizza delivery person only the gate key, not the keys to every room in the house.
5.4 Test Before Trusting
Regular Simulations: Periodically conduct tests to ensure the integration is working:
- Detection Test: Use the EICAR test file (a harmless “virus” used for testing) to verify if malware alerts reach Security Hub CSPM
- Latency Test: Measure how long it takes from detection until the alert appears on the dashboard
- Failover Test: Simulate a failure and see how the system behaves
Alert Validation: In the first months, manually review a sample of alerts to ensure that:
- Severity levels are correct
- Information is complete
- There aren’t excessive false positives
5.5 Empower Your Team
The best technology in the world is useless if your team doesn’t know how to use it properly:
Initial Training:
- Show where to find Vision One alerts in Security Hub CSPM
- Explain how to interpret each type of alert
- Demonstrate the incident response workflow
Internal Documentation: Create a simple guide with common scenarios:
- “What to do when a malware alert appears?”
- “How to investigate an unauthorized access attempt?”
- “When to escalate to the senior security team?”
Culture of Continuous Improvement: Encourage the team to suggest improvements. Those who use the tool every day have valuable insights on how to make it more efficient.
6. Measurable Benefits of the Integration
After implementing the integration, you’ll see concrete results:
6.1 Reduction in Response Time
Before: An alert could take hours to be noticed, investigated, and responded to, as it was “lost” among various tools.
After: With everything consolidated, the average response time can drop from hours to minutes. Organizations report reductions of up to 70% in the time between detection and containment.
6.2 Decrease in Missed Alerts
The Alert Fatigue Problem: When your team needs to check multiple systems, some alerts inevitably go unnoticed.
The Solution: With the unified view, the probability of a critical alert going unnoticed is practically zero. Everything is in one place, prioritized by importance.
6.3 Resource Savings
Fewer Tools, More Efficiency:
- Reduction in the number of dashboards that need to be monitored
- Less time spent switching between systems
- Security team can focus on analysis and response, not on searching for information
Measurable ROI: If an analyst saves 2 hours per day by not needing to search for information in multiple places, that’s 40 hours per month. Multiply this by the size of your team and you’ll see the real value.
Conclusion
The integration between Trend Vision One and AWS Security Hub CSPM represents a significant step in modernizing cloud security. By unifying alerts, automating responses, and providing complete visibility, it transforms the way security teams operate.
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