Infrastructure Security: Hardening Cloud Environments
Cloud infrastructure security requires deliberate configuration — the default settings of cloud platforms are not secure defaults. "Shared responsibility" means the cloud provider secures the underlying infrastructure, but you are responsible for securing everything you configure on top of it.
Cloud Account Security
- Root account protection: AWS root and equivalent accounts should not be used for daily operations — a separate administrator account with MFA is used instead. Root access keys should not exist.
- MFA on all IAM users: Mandatory MFA on every account with console access
- Least privilege IAM: Every user, role, and service has minimal permissions required. No wildcard (*) actions in production policies. Regular access reviews.
- CloudTrail / audit logging: Enable API-level audit logging across all accounts and regions — alerts on suspicious activity
Network Hardening
- All resources in private subnets unless specifically required to be public
- Security groups with minimal open ports — no 0.0.0.0/0 on management ports
- NAT gateways for outbound internet access from private subnets — not direct internet gateway attachment
- VPC Flow Logs enabled for network forensics
Storage and Data Security
- S3 bucket public access blocked at account level
- Encryption at rest enabled on all storage: RDS, EBS, S3
- Deletion protection enabled on databases
- KMS key management for sensitive data encryption
Continuous Assessment
We run AWS Security Hub / Azure Security Center / GCP Security Command Center as continuous security posture assessment, alerting on configuration drift from security best practices.