What is AWS Cloud Security? A Complete Guide
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What is AWS Cloud Security?
Put simply, AWS security refers to the actions implemented to ensure the security of the data stored in the AWS cloud. These actions include data protection from unauthorized access, and following the compliance, and legal requirements.Technically speaking, AWS cloud security is a comprehensive framework consisting of security tools, protocols, and services operating jointly with the vision of ensuring AWS-hosted data’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability.Security on AWS is a shared responsibility between the AWS and customers. Amazon Web Services is responsible for the heavy-lifting job of managing the core infrastructure that power all the services in the cloud. This infrastructure includes hardware (regions, availability zones, and edge locations), and software (database, compute, storage, networking). On the other hand, Customers are responsible for maintaining the security in their cloud environments.Customers’ security responsibilities include:- All the customer data is hosted on the AWS cloud
- Platform, and applications
- Identity & access management
- Operating system, network & firewall configuration
- Client-side, server-side, and networking traffic encryption.
Benefits of Using AWS Security


1. Complete Visibility and Data Control
The biggest concern with cloud security is that your data is stored in data servers that are out of sight. AWS is alleviating this fear by allowing organizations to have superior visibility and control over their data.
You have complete information about where your data is stored, and who is accessing this data in real-time. AWS CloudTrail, a native logging service tracks the user’s activities and records the API calls across the AWS environment. This allows you to know who accessed what data, and when. So, if there is any suspicious access, you can preemptively act on it to maintain the data integrity. Additionally, with security automation, and activity monitoring you can ensure the detection of suspicious activities automatically eliminating the risk of activities being undetected.All these elements of AWS security put you in great control of your organization’s biggest asset: data.2. The Gold Standard for Data Privacy
AWS is continually improving its capabilities of data privacy. It allows you to implement custom data privacy controls specific to your organization with the help of AWS access, logging, and encryption capabilities for how data is stored, collected, assessed, and deleted in AWS.You can also implement data encryption keys fully managed by your security team, or by AWS. Over the years, Amazon Web Services has achieved several privacy information management certifications including ISO 27017, ISO 27701, and ISO 27018.It also helps you maintain data sovereignty by allowing you to choose one or more regions to store your customer’s data.3. Automate and Reduce Security Risks
AWS allows you to automate security tasks to prevent delays and human misconfiguration errors. It has a set of integrated services and solutions that automate the security processes from detection, response, and remediation of security incidents. For example, the machine learning capabilities embedded in AWS, automatically classify and protect sensitive data like personally identifiable information, payment information, health information, etc.Amazon Web Services also allows you to automate infrastructure to apply security and compliance control. For example, AWS Config continually audits the resources and provides a detailed report consisting of compliance with both internal and external policies. Non-compliant resources will be detected immediately, and predefined actions can be performed like isolating resources, applying patches, and reverting to the compliance state without any human intervention.4. Global Network of AWS Security Partner
The biggest benefit of working with Amazon Web Services is gaining access to the thousands of AWS security services providers. These partners have deep expertise in the AWS ecosystem and can help you maintain security at every stage of cloud adoption.AWS Security Tools Helping to Achieve Security Objectives
AWS has a wide range of security-focused tools that help you to meet all your security needs. Here we have outlined some of the most common AWS security tools according to their use cases:1. Identity and Access Management
Amazon Web Services has products and services to get complete control of identities, resources, and permissions for workforce and customer-facing applications.AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Amazon Cognito
Amazon Verified Permissions
AWS Organizations
AWS Resource Access Manager
2. Network and Application Protection
Amazon Web Services has a range of tools to apply fine-grained security policies at the host, network, and application levels.AWS Firewall Manager
AWS Network Firewall
It works with AWS Firewall Manager and allows the configuration of fine-grained policies to control the network. These policies can be centrally applied on the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and accounts.
AWS Shield
AWS Verified Access
AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)
3. AWS Detection and Response Services
Detection and response services work together to detect and prioritize security events across AWS environments.Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon Inspector
AWS Security Hub
A cloud security posture management service that performs automated security checks, and centralizes the security insights in one place.
Amazon Security Lake
Amazon Detective
AWS Config
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Cloud Trail
- AWS IoT Device Defender
It is used to secure IoT devices to provide detailed information about their health, performance, and vulnerabilities. This information safeguards your IoT devices from unauthorized access and suspicious activities.
4. AWS Data Protection Services
Data is one of the most sensitive assets of every organization. AWS offers a comprehensive set of security tools to protect the data.Amazon Macie
A sensitive data discovery and protection service powered by machine learning, and pattern matching algorithms. It automatically discovers and builds the interactive map of sensitive data to find out the data risks to facilitate automated protection.
AWS Key Management Service
A secure key management service allows you to create, store, and manage keys to ensure robust data encryption for the data stored in the AWS cloud. It is a centralized place for monitoring the use of keys, setting policies, and revoking key access.
AWS CloudHSM
It allows you to generate and use the cryptographic keys to securely sign, and secure the sensitive data on AWS cloud. It provides a dedicated single-tenant hardware security module (HSM) to perform cryptographic operations meeting the data regulations requirements.
AWS Certificate Manager
AWS Payment Cryptography
AWS Secrets Manager
5. AWS Compliance Management
AWS offers comprehensive compliance controls meeting all the compliance requirements of its global customers.AWS Artifact
AWS Audit Manager
AWS Cloud Security Best Practices to Build Stronger Security Foundation
As said earlier, AWS cloud security is a shared responsibility. As a customer, you’re responsible for playing your role with consistency. AWS cloud security best practices help you enhance your security posture.
Implement a Strong Security Foundation
The seeds of greatness are sown in a fertile foundation. This seems true in the context of Amazon Web Services security. Security is built with every basic preventive measure internally that is often overlooked.
The very basic, and obvious security best practice is ensuring only the authorized users can access the information, and to the extent they are allowable to. We often emphasize more on protecting the unauthorized access coming from external actors, having no or less control over the security risks posed by internal actors.AWS allows you to enforce strong identity and access management principles, ensuring that only authorized persons have access to the information, and only in an intended manner.Implement the principle of least privilege backed by AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM). This will ensure that the users only have access to the information required to perform their jobs. Furthermore, you can enable the MAF (multi-factor authorization) for all IAM users to add an extra level of security.Proactive Threat Detections
The earlier you identify, the better you mitigate the risks associated with threats. AWS allows you to become proactive with threat detection by processing logs, events, and monitoring. It employs a continuous monitoring mechanism to inform you with real-time insights into the security posture of your AWS environment.
You have to set up AWS security services like Amazon GuardDuty to continuously monitor your environment for malicious activities, and suspected behavior. Additionally, AWS-native tools like Amazon Inspector can help you find security vulnerabilities and deviations from security best practices to ensure swift remediation can be undertaken.Establish a Lesson-Learned Framework
Amazon Web Service Cloud security is an ongoing process in today’s dynamically evolving landscape. You have to iterate the security on the outcomes of the incidents to protect the AWS environment from advanced threats and improve the security posture.Establishing a lesson-learned framework ensures that AWS security mistakes are not repeated. The process of building such a framework starts with a structured process that includes incident documentation, root-cause analysis, and post-incident reviews. You can use AWS-native tools like AWS CloudTrail for logging and monitoring the account activity, and AWS Lambda for automated analysis and incident tagging. These security insights should be embedded into your security policies and training program for continuous improvement.
How We Can Help You to Maintain Security on AWS?
With the right AWS services and tools, you can adopt the innovation across your organization while maintaining security. To achieve this, an experienced, and certified AWS security specialist with deep insights into the security trends, and emerging challenges can help you maintain and continuously improve the security posture. Here at Cyntexa, we’re a team of certified AWS professionals working to make security a proactive approach rather than something that needs to be taken care of only when it impacts you. With a suite of services including AWS migration, application development, and managed services, we’re embedding security at every stage of your journey. Let’s connect with us to learn more about how we can help you secure your AWS cloud against today’s and tomorrow’s security threats.Don’t Worry, We Got You Covered!
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AUTHOR
Vishwajeet Srivastava
Salesforce Data Cloud, AI Products, ServiceNow, Product Engineering
Co-founder and CTO at Cyntexa also known as “VJ”. With 10+ years of experience and 22+ Salesforce certifications, he’s a seasoned expert in Salesforce Data Cloud & AI Products, Product Engineering, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, ServiceNow, and Managed Services. Known for blending strategic thinking with hands-on expertise, VJ is passionate about building scalable solutions that drive innovation, operational efficiency, and enterprise-wide transformation.


Cyntexa.
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