20 May 2024

5 AWS S3 security best practices you should adopt today

Did you know that worldwide spend on IT security is set to hit £110 billion in 2021? It's a statistic that points to the importance of securing your IT and wider business. Naturally, protecting your cloud infrastructure in AWS S3 is a critical part of the puzzle. To help you level up what you're currently doing, we thought we'd share five best practices.

1. Provision IAM

Without effective identity access management (IAM), you'll inevitably suffer the consequences of the wrong people accessing your systems. (Here are some of the signs that access management might be an issue for you right now.) When you instead use IAM, you can identify policy violations and remove access privileges automatically.

The good news is that AWS IAM is a feature that comes at no extra charge. To kick things off, simply go to the AWS Management Console.

2. Encrypt data

According to IBM, the average data breach cost rose from £2.84 million to £3.12 million in 2021.

With that in mind, you'll want to take advantage of data encryption in S3. This means you'll need to set up default server-side encryption. If you wish to encrypt existing Amazon S3 objects, you can use Amazon S3 Batch operations. The best way to do this is to deploy the batch operations copy process.

3. Block public access

Yes, by default, all new buckets, objects and access points can't be accessed by the public. However, it is still possible to turn on public access.

To ensure no one provides public access (deliberately or by accident), you'll want to use the S3 block public access settings.

4. Enlist the right policies

Without the right policies in place, you'll leave AWS S3 open to security issues.

The key to this is implementing the principle of least privilege. That way, your staff will only have the access they need to perform their roles, and no more.

5. Log activity

It's wise to keep a watchful eye on everything that's going on in your infrastructure, but how do you do so without wasting the time of your IT staff?

Thankfully, server access logs are free to create in S3. And, for more vigilance, you can use activity and object-level logging.

Secure your AWS S3 infrastructure the smart way

Is your cloud environment the watertight vault it needs to be?

As you can see, there are clear strategies to protect your infrastructure. From using the principle of least privilege to encrypting all your data – you now know many of the core components.

However, although the path to securing S3 is well-trodden, setting things up yourself is not always the painless experience you might hope for. Considering this, it can make sense to rely on specialists who have been there and done it before - ideally, those with decades of experience.

If you'd like to protect your AWS S3 environment, why not explore our AWS Managed Security Services?