Security and Identity in AWS

Introduction

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most extensive and widely used cloud platform globally, with over 200 fully-featured services available from data centers worldwide. AWS is used by millions of clients, including the fastest-growing startups, most prominent corporations, and top government agencies, to reduce costs, improve agility, and accelerate innovation.

Security and Identity

AWS offers security and identity management services to assist businesses to protect their data and systems in the cloud. The next section takes a high-level look at these services.

Data protection

AWS offers services to help you safeguard your data, accounts, and workloads from illegal access. AWS data security services monitor and safeguard your accounts and workloads by encrypting and managing keys, as well as detecting threats.

Network & Application Protection

AWS Network and Application Protection services enable you to apply fine-grained security policies throughout your company at every network control point. When you use AWS Networking services to construct your network, you have a lot of flexibility regarding where and how you design your network architecture, from private subnets to public, Internet-facing networks. The AWS Network and Application Protection services then offer similarly customizable methods for inspecting and filtering traffic to prevent unwanted access to resources. For example, to enhance availability and application responsiveness, you may quickly set up always-on detection and automated inline threat mitigations for your web apps.

AWS offers services to your network and application security teams tailored to their specific security demands and regulatory requirements. The AWS network and application protection services provide fine-grained security at the host, network, and application levels. Amazon VPC security groups provide protection for resources in your AWS workloads at the host level. An RDS database, for example, may have its own security group per network interface, with rules allowing inbound and outgoing traffic to particular server IP ranges.

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

The AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects web applications from typical threats and vulnerabilities that might degrade application availability, compromise security, or use too many resources. By setting customizable web security rules, AWS WAF allows enterprises control over which traffic to accept or prohibit to their online applications.

With features like stateful inspection, intrusion prevention, and web filtering, AWS Network Firewall allows you to securely restrict traffic to, from, and in-between your VPCs at the network level. AWS Web Application Firewall, for example, allows you to filter any component of a web request, such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, HTTP content, or URI strings, to prevent typical attack patterns like SQL injection and cross-site scripting. AWS Shield defends your networks and applications against even the most powerful DDoS attacks and provides managed detection and response to thwart targeted attacks. Through integration with AWS Firewall Manager, you can receive central administration and visibility of all these network and application security services in one location.

Threat detection & continuous monitoring

AWS detects risks in your cloud environment by continually monitoring network activity and account behavior.

Compliance & data privacy

AWS provides you with a complete picture of your compliance status and continually analyses your environment using automated compliance checks based on AWS best practices and industry standards.

AWS Identity

AWS Identity Services may be used to manage identities, resources, and permissions in a safe and scalable manner. You may use fine-grained access controls to offer your workers, apps, and devices the access they need to AWS services and resources under readily deployable governance guardrails for applications operating on AWS. AWS Identity Services provide you a lot of flexibility in where and how you handle your employee, partner, and customer identities, so you can transfer existing workloads to AWS with confidence. AWS Identity Services enables you to develop a single identity and access strategy for hybrid workload deployments across your on-premises and AWS environments.

You may use AWS Identity Services for customer-facing web and mobile apps to easily add sign-up and sign-in capabilities for your app users, which are supported by scalable cloud directories.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Organizations may use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to securely restrict access to AWS Cloud services and resources for their users. Organizations may use IAM to create and manage AWS users and groups and employ permissions to grant and prohibit access to AWS resources.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that makes it simple for companies to establish and control the encryption keys used to encrypt their data. It leverages Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to keep your keys secure. AWS KMS integrates with several other AWS Cloud services to help secure data stored there.

AWS Directory Service

The AWS Directory Service enables enterprises to set up and administer Microsoft Active Directory on the AWS Cloud and connect their AWS resources to an on-premises Microsoft Active Directory. It may be used to manage users and groups, offer single sign-on to apps and services, build and apply Group Policies, domain connect Amazon EC2 instances, and ease the deployment and maintenance of cloud-based Linux and Windows workloads.

AWS Certificate Manager

AWS Certificate Manager is a service that allows businesses to effortlessly issue, manage, and deploy Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security certificates for use with AWS Cloud services. It automates the process of acquiring, uploading, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates, which is time-consuming and inefficient. Organizations may use AWS Certificate Manager to get a certificate, install it on AWS resources like Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon CloudFront distributions, and let AWS Certificate Manager handle renewals.