AWS Well-Architected Framework - Security Pillar

What Is the Security Pillar?

The Security pillar encompasses the ability to protect data, systems, and assets to take advantage of cloud technologies to improve your security.

Why is Security important to improving my architecture?

Customers

Your customers may be internal to your organization, or external.

Legal and regulatory requirements

You will have legal and regulatory requirements that appropiate security controls and architecture can help address.

What are the design principles of the Security Pillar?

Implement a strong identity foundation

Implement the principle of least privilege, and enforce separation of duties with appropiate authorization for each interaction with Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources.

Enable traceability

Monitor, alert, and audit actions and changes to your environment in real time. Integrate log and metric collection with systems to automatically investigate and take action.

Apply security at all layers

Apply a defense-in-depth approach with multiple security controls. Apply to all layers (for example, edge of network, VPC, load balancing, every instance and compute service, operating system, application, and code).

Automate security best practices

Use automated, software-based security mechanisms to improve your ability to securely scale more rapidly and cost-effectively. Create secure architectures, including the implementation of controls that are defined and managed as code in version-controlled templates.

Protect data in transit and at rest

Classify your data into sensitivity levels and use mechanisms, such encryption, tokenization, and access control, where appropiate.

Keep people away from data

Use mechanisms and tools to reduce or eliminate the need for direct access or manual processing of data. This reduces the risk of mishandling or modification and human error when handling sensitive data.

Prepare for security events.

Prepare for an incident by having incident management and investigation policies and processes that align to your organizational requirements. Run incident response simulations, and use tools with automation to increase your speed for detection, investigation, and recovery.