3.4. Security & Compliance

This section is dedicated to the critical responsibility of securing your AWS environment and ensuring it adheres to compliance standards. We will cover identity and access management, network and data security, and audit and compliance automation.

What happens when security is an afterthought? You discover it during an audit — or worse, during a breach. Consider a developer who creates an IAM role with AdministratorAccess "temporarily" for testing. Without permissions boundaries, that role becomes a permanent escalation path. Without SCPs, no organizational guardrail prevents it. Without Config rules, nobody detects it. Each missing layer compounds the risk.

Think of AWS security like concentric castle walls. IAM policies are the inner keep — they define who can do what. Permissions boundaries are the inner wall — they cap the maximum possible access. SCPs are the outer wall — they restrict the entire account. Security groups and NACLs are the moat — they control network access. No single layer is sufficient; defense in depth means an attacker must breach ALL layers, not just one.

The fundamental trade-off is security friction versus developer velocity. Lock everything down and deployments grind to a halt. Open everything up and you're one misconfiguration from a data breach. How do you balance them? Through ABAC (tag-based access that scales without policy changes), preventive guardrails (SCPs that block dangerous actions silently), and detective controls (GuardDuty, Config) that catch what prevention misses.