Security and Compliance
An overview of the second AWS Cloud Practitioner domain: the shared responsibility model, compliance and governance, identity and access management with IAM, and the AWS services that protect your resources.
Security and Compliance is the second domain of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course, and it carries the most weight on the exam. Cloud Concepts gave you the vocabulary; this domain shows you how AWS keeps workloads safe and who is responsible for what. It all builds on one idea: in the cloud, security is a shared job between AWS and you.
Security and Compliance is 30% of the CLF-C02 exam, the largest share of any single domain. The concepts here are practical, and most of them map to controls you would actually configure in a real AWS account.
What This Domain Covers
- the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, and how the split between AWS and customer duties shifts by service type
- compliance and governance: AWS Artifact, encryption on AWS, and monitoring and auditing your account
- identity and access management with IAM: users, groups, roles, and policies
- account security fundamentals: the root user, least privilege, and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- federated and centralized access with IAM Identity Center
- the AWS security services that protect your network and detect threats, plus the official resources for staying current
Why It Matters
Security comes up everywhere on the exam, and the Shared Responsibility Model is the idea behind a large share of those questions. Once you can say what AWS secures, what you secure, and how that line moves between EC2, a managed database, and a serverless function, you can reason through most security scenarios instead of memorizing them.
This domain is also the most hands-on part of the course. IAM, MFA, and least privilege are among the first things you set up in a real AWS account, so the time you spend here pays off well beyond the exam.