What is NOT a best practice for protecting compute resources?

Enabling VPC Flow Logs is indeed a valuable practice for gaining insight into network traffic and monitoring data flow within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud environment. However, it is primarily focused on security monitoring rather than directly protecting compute resources.

The other options listed represent proactive measures that can directly enhance the security of compute resources. Implementing intrusion detection and prevention systems actively monitors and responds to potential threats. Automating configuration management helps ensure that compute instances are consistently and correctly configured according to security best practices. Regularly scanning for vulnerabilities identifies weaknesses in your compute resources that could be exploited by attackers, allowing for timely remediation.

In summary, while enabling VPC Flow Logs is important for security visibility, it does not actively protect the compute resources in the same way that the other choices do, making it the correct answer in the context of this question.