Book Image

AWS: Security Best Practices on AWS

By : Albert Anthony
Book Image

AWS: Security Best Practices on AWS

By: Albert Anthony

Overview of this book

With organizations moving their workloads, applications, and infrastructure to the cloud at an unprecedented pace, security of all these resources has been a paradigm shift for all those who are responsible for security; experts, novices, and apprentices alike. This book focuses on using native AWS security features and managed AWS services to help you achieve continuous security. Starting with an introduction to Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to secure your AWS VPC, you will quickly explore various components that make up VPC such as subnets, security groups, various gateways, and many more. You will also learn to protect data in the AWS platform for various AWS services by encrypting and decrypting data in AWS. You will also learn to secure web and mobile applications in AWS cloud. This book is ideal for all IT professionals, system administrators, security analysts, solution architects, and chief information security officers who are responsible for securing workloads in AWS for their organizations. This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from material from Packt's Mastering AWS Security, written by Albert Anthony.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Data Security


  • Encryption: As a best practice to secure your data in AWS, encrypt everything! Encrypt your data at rest in AWS across your storage options. Automation and omnipresent, that's how you should design your encryption. Encrypting data helps you in the following ways:

    • Privacy

    • Integrity

    • Reliability

    • Anonymity

  • Use KMS: Encryption using keys rely heavily on availability and security of keys. If you have the key, you have the data. Essentially, whoever owns the key, owns the data. So, ensure that you use a reliable and secure key management infrastructure for managing all your keys. AWS KMS is a fully managed service available for all your key management needs. Use this to manage your keys for encrypting data in S3, RDS, EBS volumes, and so on. Also, ensure that you control access to these keys through IAM permissions and policies.

  • Rotate your keys: Ensure that keys are rotated periodically, usually quite frequently. The longer a key lives the higher is the security risk attached to it...