Category: AWS Config

One of the security best practices that is time-consuming to manage is enforcing IAM access key rotation for IAM users. Access keys give IAM users the ability to connect to Amazon EC2 instances. Therefore rotating these regularly (for example, every 90 days) is one of the key steps in protecting your resources from unauthorized access. […]

AWS Config Rules allow customers to evaluate the configuration of resources against best practices and perform remediation when specified configuration policies are not being followed. Using AWS Config Conformance Packs, customers can create a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions in a single pack that can be deployed across AWS Organizations. This provides […]

AWS Organizations enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. Organizations includes consolidated billing and account management capabilities that enable you to better meet your business’s budgetary, security, and compliance needs. As an administrator of an organization, you can create member accounts in your organization and invite […]

As my colleague Ilya Epshteyn introduced in his blog titled “How financial institutions can approve AWS services for highly confidential data,” common across the financial services industry is a formal assessment process for cloud services. These assessment processes vary in depth and breadth, striving to determine which cloud services will be best suited to fulfill […]

AWS announced that AWS Systems Manager’s Run Command now offers Chef InSpec audits through the AWS-RunInspecChecks document. This is a significant win for Systems Manager enthusiasts and other users who prefer an OS-based compliance check solution rather than using a whole new cloud service. This blog post is not about how to keep an OS […]

Since AWS Systems Manager was launched, the service has continued to add new features for customers to use. Many features are enabled by granting your Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers access to Systems Manager using an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role with the necessary permissions. To provide customers more flexible, fine-grained permission […]

AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to quickly let their users deploy approved IT services to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS. However, users launching multiple instances can cause issues because: Some instances are not always active. The lack of limits on the number of active instances can result in an organization’s costs going […]

AWS Config is a service that maintains a configuration history of your AWS resources and evaluates the configuration against best practices and your internal policies. You can use this information for operational troubleshooting, audit, and compliance use cases. In this blog post, I share best practices on how to use AWS Config as a tool […]

AWS Config conformance packs help you manage configuration compliance of your AWS resources at scale – from policy definition to auditing and aggregated reporting using a common framework and packaging model. Many enterprises have multiple AWS accounts to manage their AWS infrastructure and demand an easy way to manage compliance policy definitions across their organization. […]

I’m excited to introduce you to our latest feature addition, AWS Config Advanced Query. Advanced query, launched last year, makes it easy to query the resource configuration properties of your AWS resources for audit, compliance, or operational troubleshooting using simple SQL-like queries. With our latest release, you can now use Advanced query with configuration aggregators, enabling you […]