AWS offers a wide range of security and compliance services available to us as customers, and it's down to us to use them within our own environments to help safeguard and protect our resources and data. It's very easy to implement and add data and services within AWS, but understanding how to protect them effectively is a different matter.

You need to understand what data you have within your environment, become aware of how to monitor that data, and whether any changes are happening to not only the data, but the resources that are behind that data as well.

Maintaining compliance within a cloud environment can be a tricky task to implement effectively; due to the fluidity of the cloud, resources are changing all of the time, but you need to know when a change is a standard operational change, or a restricted unauthorized change. The services covered within this chapter can help you maintain a level of security, compliance, and reporting, to help you govern, protect, and control your environment through best practices.