Top Five Best Practices to Ensure Effective Security in Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the top cloud platform which offers comprehensive set of tools to design, develop and deploy infrastructure on cloud. Compared other cloud platforms in the market, AWS is the most chosen and capable to support an array of cloud solutions. Regardless of the business domain, be it healthcare, finance, education, ecommerce or any other, AWS has been always been the most flexible, dynamic, cost-effective and scalable, platform for users and developers.

Every good solution requires minor improvement, if covered can offer remarkable solutions. There are certain best practices following which the minor improvement can be covered while deploying any application on the AWS cloud. In this post we have covered the five best practices to ensure effective security in AWS. If you are planning to deploy or adapt AWS platform for your business applications then this post will be of interest to you. If you are planning to hire AWS DevOps consultants then check for the best practices with them.

One of the major point of discussion is the shared model of AWS security. The reason why AWS always stresses on the security is because the security of physical components of machines, storage or security features are managed by AWS. However, it also stresses clients to implement additional layer security mechanism to their applications.

Here are the best security practices in AWS that you would like to explore for your applications on cloud:

Usage of Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM is the one of the functionalities offered by AWS which enables you to have a secured and controlled access of applications and resources on AWS. With the help of this feature, the user will not be able to access the main link to sign in, as the IAM generates its own link and sign-in URL. Using this URL, user will be able to generate unique username and password by which the it acts as an additional layer to the mainframe application login.

Moreover, IAM only offers access to specific APIs based on the access control and least privilege principle. This prevents the user from accessing any of the admin operations or core application resources.

Firewalls for Web Applications

In order to avoid any kind of breach in the AWS systems, firewall for web applications is one of the best mechanism to implement. AWS marketplace has such firewall which allows implementing on any application as per your requirement and monitoring traffic flowing in. Any kind of malicious activity or traffic pertaining to the application on which the firewall is implemented can be identified and discarded.

Two Factor Authentication

One of the best way to prevent hackers from accessing your data is implementing two factor authentication mechanism in which any user trying to login the system has to go through two forms of verification. This can be configured as a password and code or as per the requirements. The codes can be system generated or as required.

Encrypted Access

In certain cases, no matter how secured your network is, some hackers make mass breakout to get into cloud platforms. The simple way to protect your network from such breakouts is using encryption. There are some software available on AWS while some can be developed as per the business requirements by which the data can be encrypted and mass attacks can be blocked. This reduces the risk of getting user information on the hands of hackers.

Monitoring and Tracking Activities

With the help of certain tools available on AWS, it is very convenient to track certain malicious tasks which can be threat to the business application. This primary step tracking unauthorized access, suspicious entries or malicious activities can be stopped in advance using the monitoring tools. Data is protected and implementing other layers of security can further protect the data.

Final Take

There are different types and methods of using such layers depending on the sensitivity of the data on AWS cloud. Choose the best option that suits for your business and if you are unclear of which layer to implement when, then you can consult the AWS DevOps Consultants team to get more security tips for your platform.