Secure cloud hosting for accounting software

The challenge

Accounting software handles sensitive financial data, so the hosting environment has to meet a higher bar than a typical web application: encryption at rest and in transit, strict access controls, and a full audit trail of who touched what and when, all without adding friction to the team shipping the product.

What we did

• Deployed the application on EC2 inside a private network configuration, with no direct public access to application or database instances
• Set up RDS in a Multi-AZ configuration so the database fails over automatically if the primary instance has an issue, without manual intervention
• Used S3 for document and file storage, encrypted at rest
• Enabled KMS-managed encryption keys across storage and database layers, so financial data is encrypted both at rest and in transit
• Put AWS WAF in front of the application to filter malicious traffic before it reaches the app
• Enabled CloudTrail so every account-level action is logged and auditable, a baseline expectation for financial software
• Set up CloudWatch for infrastructure and application monitoring and alerting
• Configured IAM with least-privilege roles enforced across the environment

Architecture and stack

Outcomes

• Financial data encrypted at rest and in transit by default
• Automatic database failover with no manual intervention required
• A complete, auditable trail of account-level activity