Understand the shared responsibility model – Introduction to AWS Security Concepts and the Shared Responsibility Model

Understand the shared responsibility model

As discussed earlier, security in the AWS cloud is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, while customers are responsible for security in the cloud. Understanding this model is crucial to ensuring that you are doing your part to secure your resources.

Use AWS security services and features

AWS offers a wide range of security services and features that can significantly enhance the security posture of your cloud environment. These services are designed to provide robust protection for your resources, data, and applications.

Amazon GuardDuty functions as a vigilant sentinel, constantly scanning for harmful or unauthorized activities that could pose a threat to your AWS accounts and workloads. By harnessing the power of machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence, it can discern and prioritize potential threats.

Amazon Detective acts as your personal investigator, simplifying the task of analyzing and investigating potential security issues or suspicious activities. It autonomously gathers log data from your AWS resources and applies advanced techniques such as machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to create interactive visualizations.

AWS Security Hub serves as your security command center, providing a comprehensive snapshot of your security posture and compliance status across your AWS accounts. It consolidates and prioritizes security alerts from multiple AWS services and AWS Partner solutions.

AWS Config acts as your configuration auditor, allowing you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. It continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against customized target configurations.

AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower serve as your central governance and management platform across your fleet of AWS accounts and their underlying resources. With AWS Organizations, you can centrally manage policies across multiple accounts, while you can also use AWS Control Tower to set up shared services and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment.

AWS Secrets Manager is your key to safeguarding access to your confidential data, as well as any secrets and credentials needed to operate your applications, services, and resources without the upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs of operating your own infrastructure.These services form the backbone of AWS security offerings. More details on how to use them and other AWS security services will be covered in Chapter 5.