Skip to content
English
Incident Support Customer Portal
Contact Us
  • There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

How does AWS keep data safe?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) employs a robust set of security measures and best practices to protect customer data across its cloud infrastructure.

AWS provides customers with the tools and services needed to build secure and compliant applications, offering a shared responsibility model to clarify the division of security responsibilities between AWS and the customer. Here’s how AWS keeps data safe:

1. Encryption

  • Data at Rest: AWS uses encryption to protect data stored on its cloud services. Services like Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB offer built-in encryption. Data is automatically encrypted at rest using strong encryption standards such as AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard).
  • Data in Transit: AWS ensures that data transmitted over networks is protected using strong encryption protocols like TLS (Transport Layer Security) to safeguard data while it’s in transit between servers, customers, or services.
  • Customer-Controlled Keys: AWS customers can manage their encryption keys using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) or AWS CloudHSM. This allows customers to control access to their encryption keys, ensuring data is only decrypted by authorized entities.

2. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): IAM helps control who can access AWS resources. Customers can define specific permissions, roles, and policies to restrict access to their resources.
  • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): To enhance security, AWS supports MFA for user accounts. This adds an additional layer of protection by requiring a second form of authentication in addition to the standard password.
  • Federation: AWS supports integration with third-party identity providers and supports federated access via SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect, allowing companies to manage identities from their own identity provider.

3. Network Security

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): AWS enables the creation of isolated networks with VPCs. Within a VPC, you can configure subnets, routing tables, and network access control lists (NACLs) to control traffic between different parts of your infrastructure.
  • Security Groups: AWS Security Groups act as virtual firewalls to control inbound and outbound traffic for EC2 instances and other resources. Security groups are stateful, meaning that responses to inbound traffic are automatically allowed, regardless of outbound rules.
  • AWS Shield: AWS Shield provides protection against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. It offers two levels of protection: AWS Shield Standard (automatically included for all AWS customers) and AWS Shield Advanced (offering enhanced DDoS protection with detailed monitoring and attack mitigation).
  • AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall): AWS WAF helps protect web applications by allowing you to define rules to block malicious traffic and prevent attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).

4. Threat Detection and Monitoring

  • Amazon GuardDuty: This is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity or unusual behavior. GuardDuty can detect threats such as unusual API calls, unauthorized access, or instances being compromised.
  • AWS Security Hub: Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security findings from multiple AWS services, third-party tools, and AWS partner solutions. It provides a comprehensive view of your security posture.
  • AWS CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail logs API calls made on your AWS account, allowing you to track who accessed what resources and when. This is useful for auditing and detecting suspicious activity.
  • Amazon Macie: Amazon Macie uses machine learning to identify sensitive data such as personal identifiable information (PII) and helps prevent accidental exposure of such data in your AWS resources.

5. Compliance and Certification

  • Global Compliance Programs: AWS undergoes regular audits to comply with major standards and regulations, including GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 1/2/3, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, and others. This ensures that AWS meets industry and governmental security and privacy requirements.
  • Data Residency: AWS allows customers to choose where their data is stored, helping to meet regional compliance and data residency requirements. AWS operates in multiple regions around the world, allowing customers to select the region where their data will reside.

6. Security in the Development Life Cycle

  • DevSecOps: AWS emphasizes security as part of the development process through DevSecOps practices, integrating security into every stage of development, from initial design to production.
  • AWS CodePipeline & AWS CodeBuild: These services allow customers to automate the build, test, and deployment of applications, including security checks such as static code analysis, vulnerability scanning, and dependency checking.

7. Backup and Disaster Recovery

  • AWS Backup: AWS provides automated backup solutions that ensure your data is regularly backed up and protected. With AWS Backup, you can manage backups across AWS services like EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, and others.
  • Disaster Recovery: AWS offers a variety of tools and services to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster, such as AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS), which helps replicate on-premises and cloud workloads to AWS for recovery.
  • Region and Availability Zone Redundancy: AWS is designed with multiple Availability Zones (AZs) within each region to ensure redundancy and resilience. In the case of an issue in one zone, services can continue operating from another zone.

8. Physical Security

  • Data Center Security: AWS operates highly secure data centers worldwide. These data centers are equipped with multiple layers of physical security such as 24/7 surveillance, biometric access controls, and guards. The physical security measures also include environmental controls, fire suppression systems, and redundancy for power and cooling.
  • Security Operations Centers (SOCs): AWS operates Security Operations Centers (SOCs) that continuously monitor their cloud infrastructure and data centers for potential security incidents and vulnerabilities.

9. Data Integrity and Audit

  • AWS CloudWatch: CloudWatch helps monitor the health and performance of your AWS resources. You can set up custom metrics and alarms for real-time monitoring of any abnormal activity.
  • AWS CloudTrail: CloudTrail logs API activity and user actions, providing an audit trail that can help identify unauthorized access or configuration changes, helping ensure the integrity of your data.

10. Security Automation

  • AWS Lambda & Automation: AWS Lambda functions can automate security responses, such as initiating an incident response or taking action based on certain triggers, like unauthorized access or a threat detection alert.
  • AWS Config: AWS Config helps track changes to AWS resources and configurations. It can automatically notify administrators of any changes that could pose a security risk, and ensure that resources are in compliance with your security policies.

11. Security Best Practices

  • Shared Responsibility Model: AWS operates under a shared responsibility model where AWS is responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure (hardware, networking, data centers, etc.), while customers are responsible for securing their data, applications, and configurations within AWS.
  • Least Privilege Access: AWS encourages customers to follow the principle of least privilege—granting users only the permissions necessary to perform their tasks. This minimizes the potential attack surface within your environment.

Conclusion:

AWS employs a multi-layered approach to security that includes strong encryption, access management, network security, monitoring, compliance, physical security, and more to keep your data safe. They provide the tools, resources, and flexibility for customers to implement their own security measures, and customers have control over many aspects of data protection. Whether you're storing data, processing it, or transmitting it, AWS ensures that your data is secure, protected from threats, and compliant with global regulations.