The AWS Europe Ireland region, eu west 1, is where many Irish firms run their cloud workloads. It is close, it keeps data in the EU, and it is the default for good reason. The default settings, however, are not secure enough on their own.
Identity And Access
Turn on multi factor authentication for every user, especially the root account, then lock the root account away. Use IAM roles rather than long lived access keys, and apply least privilege so each service can do only what it needs.
Lock Down Storage
Misconfigured S3 buckets remain one of the most common causes of data leaks. Block public access at the account level, turn on default encryption, and review bucket policies regularly. Assume any public bucket will be found.
Network And Logging
Keep databases in private subnets behind security groups, not exposed to the internet. Enable CloudTrail across all regions and GuardDuty for threat detection. Logs you never collected cannot help you during an incident.
Data Residency
Keeping workloads in eu west 1 helps with GDPR data residency, but confirm that backups, snapshots, and any third party integrations stay in the EU too. Residency is only as strong as your weakest copy.
Written by Shreesh, Shamrock Security