You might have heard of ransomware, cyber attacks, or security breaches recently and you would not want your organization to be affected by these. Some of these are shown as follows:

Systems not being configured correctly, missing updates, or using insecure communication can lead to them being hacked or being subject to a ransomware demand. This can result in litigation costs, data loss or leaks, and financial costs to your organization.

There are many reasons for ensuring your systems are secure, including the following:

• Compliance: Compliance with the law, regulations, and standards, for example, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Federal Trade Commission Act.
• Data integrity: If systems aren't secure, data could be stripped or tampered with, meaning you can no longer trust the customer data or financial reporting.

• Personally Identifiable Information (PII): Consumers and clients are aware of your privacy policy. Data should be securely protected, anonymized, and deleted when no longer required.

• Data availability: Data is available to authorized users, but if, for example, a natural disaster occurred in your data center, what would happen in terms of accessing data?

A lot of security in AWS stems from configuration and having the correct architecture, so it's important to understand the following subset of important security related terms:

• Security in transit: For example, HTTPS SSL—think of it as the padlock on your browser
• Security at rest: For example, data encryption, where only a user with a key can read the data in a data store
• Authentication: For example, a process to confirm the user or system are who they are meant to be
• Authorization: For example, permissions and control mechanisms to access specific resources