This course looks at the key Security services within AWS relevant to the Solution Architect associate exam. Core to security is Identity & Access Management, commonly referred to as IAM. This service manages identities and their permissions that are able to access your AWS resources and so understanding how this service works and what you can do with it will help you to maintain a secure AWS environment. IAM is an important service in ensuring your resources are secure.
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Learning Objectives
- Learn about identity and access management on AWS including users, groups & roles, IAM policies, MFA, identity federation, and cross-account access
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) including what it is, when to use it, how it works, and why use it
- Understand how to configure and monitor AWS WAF
- Learn about AWS Firewall Manager and its components
- Learn how to configure AWS Shield
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Cognito
With AWS Security Hub enabled, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector and Amazon Macie findings are automatically sent to Security Hub as the single point of access and remediation for security issues. On the first item, we notice that Security Hub uses AWS Config rules to perform most of its security checks for controls. On the second item, we notice AWS Security Hub automatically runs continuous, account-level configuration and security checks based on AWS best practices and industry standards.
On the third item we note, AWS Security Hub supports integration with Amazon EventBridge to automatically send notifications and remediation details of security findings. You can use custom actions to send results to a ticketing system or to an automated remediation service.
Now in this next diagram, things are a little more advanced. It's important to note that AWS Security Hub findings can display results from AWS services that include GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, AWS Firewall, AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager and AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer among many others. There's a total of over a dozen services that AWS Security Hub is able to integrate into a single point of viewing for security findings. I have no doubt, the list will continue to grow as time goes by.
For now, it's important, especially for beginners, to have a sense of the benefit delivered by the individual services that AWS Security Hub aggregates. Let's briefly discuss the first three services that integrated with security hub. They are Amazon Inspector, Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Macie. We're going to keep things simple, so please don't worry. We'll discuss the main benefits and take a look at some sample findings from screens for each of them. We'll return to our discussion of AWS Security Hub shortly after.
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.