M-BizM-Life.Co Secures sensitive data with AWS security groups and NACLs
Aman Gaidhane
Full Stack Developer || ASP .Net core || Angular || Sql server || WEB API || LINQ || Entity Framework || angular material || Git
A company named M-BizM-Life.Co moved their infrastructure to AWS. The company had sensitive data that required strict security measures, so they decided to implement both security groups and network access control lists (NACLs) in their AWS environment. Firstly, the M-BizM-Life.Co team created security groups to control inbound and outbound traffic to their AWS instances. They set up rules to allow only the necessary traffic, blocking all other traffic. For example, they allowed HTTPS traffic on port 443 to their web server instances but blocked all other traffic. They also set up rules to allow communication between their instances, such as a web server instance communicating with a database instance. The security groups ensured that only authorized traffic could access their instances. However, the M-BizM-Life.Co team realized that security groups only operate at the instance level, and they needed more control over their network traffic. Therefore, they implemented NACLs, which are like firewalls at the subnet level. NACLs allow or deny traffic based on the source and destination IP addresses, ports, and protocols. Unlike security groups, NACLs are stateless, meaning that inbound and outbound rules must be configured separately.
To ensure that their NACLs and security groups worked together effectively, the M-BizM-Life.Co team created separate subnets for their sensitive resources and their less sensitive resources. They associated the sensitive resources with a private subnet, which was protected by both security groups and NACLs. The less sensitive resources were associated with a public subnet, which was protected only by security groups. The NACLs allowed the team to restrict access to the sensitive resources even further, ensuring that only authorized traffic could reach them.
Overall, the M-BizM-Life.Co team's approach to implementing both security groups and NACLs in their AWS environment is a best practice for securing sensitive data in the cloud. By using a combination of these two tools, they were able to implement multiple layers of security controls, which helps to reduce the risk of data breaches and other security incidents.