Security Pillar - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Publication date: December 6, 2023 (Document revisions)

The focus of this paper is the security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It provides guidance to help you apply best practices, current recommendations in the design, delivery, and maintenance of secure AWS workloads.

Introduction

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand trade-offs for decisions you make while building workloads on AWS. By using the Framework, you will learn current architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the cloud. It provides a way for you to consistently measure your workload against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having well-architected workloads greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

The framework is based on six pillars:

• Operational Excellence

• Security

• Reliability

• Performance Efficiency

• Cost Optimization

• Sustainability

This paper focuses on the security pillar. This will help you meet your business and regulatory requirements by following current AWS recommendations. It’s intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), chief information security officers (CSOs/CISOs), architects, developers, and operations team members.

After reading this paper, you will understand AWS current recommendations and strategies to use when designing cloud architectures with security in mind. This paper doesn’t provide implementation details or architectural patterns but does include references to appropriate resources for this information. By adopting the practices in this paper, you can build architectures that protect your data and systems, control access, and respond automatically to security events.