Securing AWS Workloads: Beyond the Basics
Quick summary: IAM best practices, GuardDuty, Security Hub, and the layered approach to AWS security that keeps your workloads protected.
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Every AWS account starts with a root user and an open canvas. The decisions you make in the first few weeks — how you structure IAM, whether you enable logging, how you segment your network — determine whether your environment becomes a fortress or a liability.
Here is the layered security approach we recommend to every client.
Layer 1: Identity and Access
IAM is the foundation. Most security incidents trace back to overly permissive IAM policies.
- Enforce least privilege — Use IAM Access Analyzer to identify unused permissions and tighten policies.
- Require MFA everywhere — Not just the root account. All human users should have MFA enabled.
- Use IAM roles, not long-lived keys — Applications should assume roles, never embed access keys.
- Implement SCPs — Service Control Policies at the AWS Organizations level set guardrails that no individual account can override.
Layer 2: Detection and Monitoring
You cannot respond to threats you cannot see.
- Amazon GuardDuty — Continuously monitors for malicious activity across your accounts, analyzing VPC Flow Logs, DNS logs, and CloudTrail events.
- AWS Security Hub — Aggregates findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, and third-party tools into a single dashboard with compliance scores.
- CloudTrail — Enable organization-wide trail with log file validation. Store logs in a dedicated security account with immutable retention.
Layer 3: Network Security
- Security Groups as allowlists — Default deny. Only open the ports you need, to the sources you trust.
- AWS WAF — Protect web-facing applications from SQL injection, XSS, and bot traffic. Use managed rule groups as a baseline.
- VPC design — Private subnets for workloads, public subnets only for load balancers. Use VPC endpoints to keep AWS API traffic off the public internet.
Layer 4: Data Protection
- Encryption at rest — Use AWS KMS with customer-managed keys. Enable default encryption on S3, EBS, and RDS.
- Encryption in transit — Enforce TLS everywhere. Use ACM for certificate management.
- Amazon Macie — Automatically discover and protect sensitive data in S3.
Getting Your Security Baseline Right
If you are unsure where your environment stands, our team can conduct an AWS security assessment that benchmarks your configuration against AWS Well-Architected Framework security best practices and industry standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
