Protecting your Infrastructure

Before you dive into infrastructure protection, first recall a key principle of AWS—the shared responsibility model. Security, along with compliance, is considered a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. Essentially, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud and you, the customer, are responsible for the security in the cloud.

The AWS shared responsibility model is represented Figure 4.2:

Figure 5.2: AWS shared responsibility model

AWS secures the infrastructure for supporting the services they provide—that is, both the facilities (data centers) and the hardware equipment running in these facilities, whether it is compute, storage, or networking. The customer is in charge of securing their AWS resources on top of what AWS already does. This naturally varies from service to service.

If you are using an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer service such as Amazon EC2, you must ensure...