AWS Security Best Practices: How to Protect Your Data

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To improve the security of your AWS setup, it’s a good idea to follow some best practices. One key step is to use separate AWS accounts for your testing and production environments. This keeps the two environments isolated, reducing the risk if one gets compromised.

When managing access, it’s better to use IAM roles instead of IAM users for your applications. IAM roles give temporary credentials that are automatically changed and recycled. This is safer than IAM users, which have long-term passwords and access keys that don’t expire on their own.

For your backend application that needs to access S3, follow these steps:

– Create an IAM role in each account (both Test and Production) that grants only the permissions necessary for specific S3 buckets.
– Attach this role to the AWS service running your backend, such as EC2 or Lambda.
– Let the application automatically use the temporary credentials provided by that role.

This way, you don’t have to store or manage long-term credentials within your application or on your instances. If you were to use IAM user credentials embedded in your code, they could be exposed or compromised, and they wouldn’t automatically update or rotate.

If your backend runs outside of AWS, you might need to use IAM user access keys. Although this is less secure than roles, there are ways to limit the risk. Keep the keys secure, rotate them often, and grant only the minimum permissions needed.

In addition, your organization’s management account should stay restricted and be used only for administrative purposes. The actual operational users or roles for your backend should be defined within the individual accounts for testing and production, not in the management account.

Always remember to apply the principle of least privilege, giving your users and applications only the permissions they need. For example, if your application only needs to read from one S3 bucket, don’t give it permissions for other buckets or actions.

Sticking to these practices will help keep your data safe and your environment more secure.