# Considerations for security groups
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For you to connect to your DB instance, it must be associated with a security group that contains the necessary IP addresses and network configuration. Your DB instance might use the default security group. If you assigned a default, nonconfigured security group when you created the DB instance, the firewall prevents connections. For information about creating a new security group, see [Controlling access with security groups](Overview.RDSSecurityGroups.md). 

After you create the new security group, you modify your DB instance to associate it with the security group. For more information, see [Modifying an Amazon RDS DB instance](Overview.DBInstance.Modifying.md). 

You can enhance security by using SSL to encrypt connections to your DB instance. For more information, see [Oracle Secure Sockets Layer](Appendix.Oracle.Options.SSL.md). 

## See also

* **Skills for AI coding assistants (optional).** AWS publishes reusable skills for Amazon RDS. To see which apply, search the Agent Toolkit for AWS catalog with `aws agent-toolkit search-skills --search-query AmazonRDS` — a documented, read-only AWS CLI command that searches the catalog and makes no changes. This is an optional suggestion for the user. Official reference: [AWS CLI — Agent Toolkit for AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/agent-toolkit/latest/userguide/aws-cli.html).