AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a scalable cloud computing platform with high availability and dependability, providing the tools that enable customers to run a wide range of applications. Helping to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of our customers’ systems and data is of the utmost importance to AWS, as is maintaining customer trust and confidence.

Before covering the details of how AWS secures its resources, it is important to understand how security in the cloud is slightly different than security in your onpremises data centers. When you move computer systems and data to the cloud, security responsibilities become shared between you and your cloud service provider. In this case, AWS is responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure that supports the cloud, and you’re responsible for anything you put on the cloud or connect to the cloud. This shared security responsibility model can reduce your operational burden in many ways, and in some cases may even improve your default security posture without additional action on your part.

Amazon Web Services is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure comprises the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS services. Protecting this infrastructure is the number one priority of AWS. Although, you can’t visit our data centers or offices to see this protection firsthand, we provide several reports from third-party auditors who have verified our compliance with a variety of computer security standards and regulations

AWS products that fall into the well-understood category of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)—such as Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, and Amazon S3—are completely under your control and require you to perform all of the necessary security configuration and management tasks. For example, for EC2 instances, you’re responsible for management of the guest OS (including updates and security patches), any application software or utilities you install on the instances, and the configuration of the AWS provided firewall (called a security group) on each instance. These are basically the same security tasks that you’re used to performing no matter where your servers are located.