5 Steps to Secure Your AWS Environment
This article outlines five practical steps to strengthen your AWS security posture, with a focus on encryption key management and data sovereignty.
AWS adoption continues to accelerate. Gartner estimates that by 2025, over 85% of organisations will embrace a cloud-first strategy. Yet with this shift comes a fundamental question: who controls your encryption keys?
By default, AWS manages encryption keys through its Key Management Service (KMS). This works well for many workloads. But for regulated industries, sensitive data, or organisations with strict data sovereignty requirements, default key management creates gaps that compliance auditors and security teams cannot ignore.
Let's walk through five steps to secure your AWS environment properly.
Step 1: Understand the Shared Responsibility Model
AWS secures the infrastructure. You secure everything you put on it.
This means encryption, access controls, and key management are your responsibility. AWS provides the tools, but the configuration and governance fall to your team.
Many organisations assume that "encrypted by default" means "secure by default." It does not. If AWS holds the keys, AWS can technically access the data. For most workloads, this is acceptable. For highly sensitive data, it is not.
Action: Map your data classification to AWS encryption options. Identify which workloads require customer-managed keys versus AWS-managed keys.
Step 2: Implement External Key Store (XKS)
AWS External Key Store lets you use AWS KMS while keeping encryption keys outside of AWS entirely.
With XKS, your keys remain in an external key manager — whether that's an HSM, a multi-party computation (MPC) system, or another key management platform. AWS never has direct access to the key material.
This architecture provides:
True key sovereignty — keys never enter AWS infrastructure
Double encryption — AWS encrypts with its layer, your external key adds a second
Instant revocation — disable access immediately by revoking the external key
Action: Evaluate AWS XKS for workloads handling PII, financial data, healthcare records, or any data subject to strict regulatory requirements.
Step 3: Separate Key Management from Data Storage
The principle is simple: do not store your keys in the same place as your data.
When both reside in AWS, a single breach can expose everything. Attackers who compromise your AWS account gain access to encrypted data and the keys to decrypt it.
External key management breaks this attack chain. Even if your AWS environment is compromised, attackers cannot decrypt data without the external key.
Action: Deploy an external key management solution that integrates with AWS KMS via the XKS Proxy specification.
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Step 4: Enable Comprehensive Logging and Monitoring
Every key operation should be logged: creation, rotation, usage, and deletion.
AWS CloudTrail captures KMS API calls, but external key managers add another layer of audit visibility. You gain a complete picture of who accessed which keys, when, and from where.
For compliance, this audit trail is essential. Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS require demonstrable control over encryption keys.
Action: Configure CloudTrail for all KMS events. Integrate your external key manager's logs with your SIEM for unified visibility.
Step 5: Plan for Key Rotation and Revocation
Keys should rotate regularly. More importantly, you need the ability to revoke keys immediately if a breach occurs.
With AWS-managed keys, revocation is limited. With external key management, you can instantly disable access to all data encrypted with a specific key — regardless of where that data resides in AWS.
This capability, sometimes called "crypto-shredding," provides a reliable way to render data permanently inaccessible without physically deleting it.
Action: Establish key rotation policies (annual minimum, quarterly for high-sensitivity data). Document and test your key revocation procedure.
Securing AWS with DuoKey
DuoKey's AWS XKS Proxy provides enterprise-grade external key management for AWS environments.
The solution supports multiple backend key managers, including DuoKey's MPC-based key management, HashiCorp Vault, and traditional HSMs, while presenting a unified interface to AWS KMS.
Key features:
Multi-backend support — route keys to different backends based on policy
Intelligent key routing — centralised management through DuoKey Cockpit
Instant revocation — disable access without touching AWS infrastructure
Conclusion
Securing AWS is not just about enabling encryption. It is about controlling who holds the keys.
For organisations handling sensitive data, external key management through AWS XKS provides the sovereignty, auditability and control that default AWS encryption cannot.
The five steps outlined here — understanding shared responsibility, implementing XKS, separating keys from data, enabling logging, and planning for rotation — form a practical foundation for AWS security that satisfies both security teams and compliance auditors.
Next steps: Learn more about DuoKey for AWS XKS at https://duokey.com/products/aws-xks
