Curriculum Overview: Unit 6 - Security Foundations and Governance

This curriculum covers the foundational strategies and governance mechanisms required to manage security at scale within the AWS Cloud. It focuses on centralizing management, ensuring consistent resource deployment, and automating compliance auditing across multi-account environments.

Prerequisites

Before beginning this unit, learners should possess the following foundational knowledge:

• AWS Cloud Practitioner Knowledge: Understanding of core AWS services (EC2, S3, RDS) and the Shared Responsibility Model.
• IAM Fundamentals: Proficiency in creating IAM users, groups, and basic JSON policy syntax.
• Basic Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Familiarity with the concept of declarative resource provisioning (e.g., CloudFormation templates).
• Multi-Account Concepts: Awareness of why organizations use multiple AWS accounts for billing and environment isolation (Dev/Test/Prod).

Module Breakdown

Learning Objectives per Module

Module 6.1: Multi-Account Strategy

• Design a hierarchical account structure using AWS Organizations Organizational Units (OUs).
• Implement AWS Control Tower to establish a secure landing zone with automated guardrails.
• Design a strategy for delegated administrator accounts to separate security functions from the management account.

Module 6.2: Governance & Policy Control

• Author and test Service Control Policies (SCPs) to establish security boundaries that even the root user cannot bypass.
• Implement Resource Control Policies (RCPs) to manage data perimeter security.
• Establish "break-glass" procedures and MFA requirements for protecting the organization's root credentials.

Module 6.3: Consistent Deployment

• Utilize CloudFormation StackSets to deploy security baselines (e.g., IAM roles, Config rules) across hundreds of accounts simultaneously.
• Enforce resource tagging strategies to support attribute-based access control (ABAC) and cost allocation.
• Securely share resources across account boundaries using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM).

Module 6.4: Compliance & Audit

• Configure AWS Config to monitor resource configuration changes and trigger automated remediations via Systems Manager.
• Centralize security findings into a single dashboard using AWS Security Hub.
• Automate the collection of evidence for regulatory audits (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA) using AWS Audit Manager.

[!IMPORTANT] Governance is not a one-time setup. It is a continuous lifecycle of Define → Deploy → Monitor → Remediate.

Visual Overview: The Governance Lifecycle

Success Metrics

To demonstrate mastery of this unit, learners must be able to:

1. Deploy a Landing Zone: Successfully initialize AWS Control Tower and enroll at least one existing account into a managed OU.
2. Enforce Boundaries: Write an SCP that prevents any user (including root) from deleting S3 buckets or disabling CloudTrail in a member account.
3. Automate Remediation: Create an AWS Config rule that detects unencrypted S3 buckets and automatically triggers a Lambda function to encrypt or delete the bucket.
4. Audit Readiness: Generate a compliance report in AWS Audit Manager for the "AWS Foundational Security Best Practices" framework showing >90% compliance.

Real-World Application

The Enterprise Security Challenge

In a large corporation with 500+ AWS accounts, manual security configuration is impossible. This unit provides the tools to solve these specific real-world problems:

• The "Shadow IT" Problem: Prevent developers from launching expensive or unapproved instance types in test accounts using SCPs.
• The "Mismatched Tags" Problem: Use AWS Config to identify resources missing a CostCenter tag and prevent billing confusion.
• The Audit Nightmare: Instead of spending weeks manually collecting screenshots for auditors, use AWS Audit Manager to provide a cryptographic record of compliance over the last 6 months.

[!TIP] Always use the Delegated Administrator feature for services like Security Hub and GuardDuty. Never run these directly from the Management Account to keep your root environment clean and highly restricted.