Cloud Security
AWS cloud security fundamentals for growing teams
A practical baseline for identity, network boundaries and logging in AWS — the controls that prevent most common cloud incidents.
Cloud platforms make it easy to provision infrastructure quickly — which also makes it easy to misconfigure it quickly. Most AWS security incidents trace back to a small set of root causes: excessive permissions, exposed storage, missing network segmentation or insufficient logging.
A strong baseline does not require enterprise-scale tooling on day one. It requires consistent application of foundational controls as your environment grows.
Identity and access management
Apply least privilege across users, roles and service accounts. Avoid long-lived access keys where IAM roles and temporary credentials can be used instead. Enable MFA for human accounts with console or sensitive API access.
Use permission boundaries and service control policies in multi-account setups. Regularly review IAM policies — unused permissions and overly broad `*` resource grants are common findings in audits.
Network and data exposure
- Place workloads in private subnets; expose only load balancers and required endpoints publicly.
- Use security groups as stateful firewalls with explicit allow rules — default deny where possible.
- Block public access on S3 buckets by default; encrypt data at rest with KMS-managed keys.
- Review RDS, EBS and snapshot permissions — backups are frequent exfiltration paths when misconfigured.
Logging, monitoring and response
Enable CloudTrail organisation-wide, centralise logs in a dedicated audit account and protect log buckets from tampering. Pair CloudTrail with GuardDuty or equivalent threat detection for anomaly alerting.
Define runbooks for common scenarios: compromised credentials, unexpected API activity, public resource exposure. Test them — an untested incident response plan is only documentation.
Infrastructure as code as a security control
Defining infrastructure in Terraform, CloudFormation or CDK makes security review repeatable. Scan IaC templates in CI for misconfigurations before they reach production.
Our AWS security scanner project applies this pattern — combining automated checks with clear reporting so teams can fix issues before deployment.
Ready to put this into practice?
Tell us about your project and we will outline a practical approach.