Establishing and maintaining an effective security and governance posture has never been more important for enterprises. This post explains how you, as a security administrator, can use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enforce resource configurations in a manner that is designed to be secure, scalable, and primarily focused on …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now supports centralized management of root access for member accounts in AWS Organizations. With this capability, you can remove unnecessary root user credentials for your member accounts and automate some routine tasks that previously required root user credentials, such as restoring access to …

Vulnerability management is a vital part of network, application, and infrastructure security, and its goal is to protect an organization from inadvertent access and exposure of sensitive data and infrastructure. As part of vulnerability management, organizations typically perform a risk assessment to determine which vulnerabilities pose the greatest risk …

Many organizations continuously receive security-related findings that highlight resources that aren’t configured according to the organization’s security policies. The findings can come from threat detection services like Amazon GuardDuty, or from cloud security posture management (CSPM) services like AWS Security Hub, or other sources. An important question …

In this post, we continue with our recommendations for achieving least privilege at scale with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). In Part 1 of this two-part series, we described the first five of nine strategies for implementing least privilege in IAM at scale. We also looked at a …

Least privilege is an important security topic for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. In previous blog posts, we’ve provided tactical advice on how to write least privilege policies, which we would encourage you to review. You might feel comfortable writing a few least privilege policies for yourself, but …

The management of security services across organizations has evolved over the years, and can vary depending on the size of your organization, the type of industry, the number of services to be administered, and compliance regulations and legislation. When compliance standards require you to set up scoped administrative control …

As cloud environments—and security risks associated with them—become more complex, it becomes increasingly critical to understand your cloud security posture so that you can quickly and efficiently mitigate security gaps. AWS Security Hub offers close to 300 automated controls that continuously check whether the configuration of your …

Sometimes you want to configure an AWS service to access your resource in another service. For example, you can configure AWS CloudTrail, a service that monitors account activity across your AWS infrastructure, to write log data to your bucket in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When you do …

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) helps customers build secure and scalable applications. IMDS solves a security challenge for cloud users by providing access to temporary and frequently-rotated credentials, and by removing the need to hardcode or distribute sensitive credentials to instances manually or …

You can use AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to securely, simply, and consistently share supported resource types within your organization or organizational units (OUs) and across AWS accounts. This means you can provision your resources once and use AWS RAM to share them with accounts. With AWS RAM …

AWS re:Inforce took place in Anaheim, California, on June 13–14, 2023. AWS customers, partners, and industry peers participated in hundreds of technical and non-technical security-focused sessions across six tracks, an Expo featuring AWS experts and AWS Security Competency Partners, and keynote and leadership sessions. The threat detection …

March 8, 2023: We updated the post to reflect some name changes (G Suite is now Google Workspace; AWS Single Sign-On is now AWS IAM Identity Center) and associated changes to the user interface and workflow when setting up Google Workspace as an external identity provider for IAM Identity …

AWS recently announced that AWS Organizations now supports AWS CloudFormation. This feature allows you to create and update AWS accounts, organizational units (OUs), and policies within your organization by using CloudFormation templates. With this latest integration, you can efficiently codify and automate the deployment of your resources in AWS …

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we shared an overview of some of the most important 2021 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security service and feature launches. In this follow-up, we’ll dive deep into additional launches that are important for security professionals to be aware of and understand …

Many of our customers use AWS Organizations to manage multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. There are many benefits to using multiple accounts in your organization, such as grouping workloads with a common business purpose, complying with regulatory frameworks, and establishing strong isolation barriers between applications based on ownership …

Recently, AWS launched the ability to delegate administration of AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) in your AWS Organizations organization to a member account (an account other than the management account). This post will show you a practical approach to using this new feature. For the documentation for this feature …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recently launched new condition keys to make it simpler to control access to your resources along your Amazon Web Services (AWS) organizational boundaries. AWS recommends that you set up multiple accounts as your workloads grow, and you can use multiple AWS accounts to …

Background AWS Control Tower offers a straightforward way to set up and govern an Amazon Web Services (AWS) multi-account environment, following prescriptive best practices. AWS Control Tower orchestrates the capabilities of several other AWS services, including AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO), to build …

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how to deploy a solution to enrich AWS Security Hub findings with additional account-related metadata, such as the account name, the Organization Unit (OU) associated with the account, security contact information, and account tags. Account metadata can help you search …

Amazon Detective makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities by collecting log data from your AWS resources. Amazon Detective simplifies the process of a deep dive into a security finding from other AWS security services, such as …

At this time, enabling the PCI DSS standard from within AWS Security Hub enables this compliance framework only within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) account you are presently administering. This blog post showcases a solution that can be used to customize the configuration and deployment of the PCI DSS …

You can improve your organization’s security posture by enforcing access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources based on IP address and geolocation. For example, users in your organization might bring their own devices, which might require additional security authorization checks and posture assessment in order to comply with …

Here is the latest from AWS Identity from November 2020 through February 2021. The features highlighted in this blog post can help you manage and secure your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Identity services answer the question of who has access to what. They enable you to securely manage …

In this blog post, we’ll show how you can programmatically assign and audit access to multiple AWS accounts for your AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) users and groups, using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and AWS CloudFormation. With AWS SSO, you can centrally manage access and user …