2.1. Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures - Overview

💡 First Principle: Security is an intrinsic, foundational layer of every architectural decision, proactively protecting data, systems, and assets from inception to ensure business continuity and trust.

This domain explores how to apply this principle across critical areas, including:

• Secure Access: Managing identity and access for users and services.
• Secure Workloads & Applications: Protecting compute, network, and application layers.
• Data Security Controls: Implementing encryption, data classification, and compliance measures.

The focus is on comprehending and applying AWS security best practices and services to meet specific architectural requirements, ensuring robust and resilient cloud environments.

Scenario: A company is designing a new application that will handle sensitive customer data. The security team emphasizes that security must be a core part of the design from the very beginning.

Visual: Security as a Layered Defense

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⚠️ Common Pitfall: Treating security as a feature to be added at the end of a project. This almost always leads to costly rework, vulnerabilities, and potential breaches.

Key Trade-Offs:

• Security vs. Performance/Convenience: Highly secure configurations sometimes add a small performance overhead or reduce convenience. The trade-off is balancing acceptable risk with operational needs.

Reflection Question: How does a "security-first" mindset fundamentally simplify complex architectural decisions and reduce long-term risks by embedding security controls from the ground up?