Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

AWS strives for high availability and has a 99.9% uptime for most services. However, in the rare event that incidents do occur, customers should be prepared to respond. AWS Health is the primary channel to communicate service degradation, scheduled changes, and resource impacting issues. For customers running critical applications, having access to proactive and real-time […]

With the increase in online traffic, organizations have prioritized the continuous monitoring of their applications so that they can detect issues before they cause widespread problems. Canaries emulate a user flow, making it possible for organizations to proactively catch errors thereby ensuring a good customer experience. Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to create canaries to […]

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. When you run your applications on AWS, you often use AWS resources, which you must create and manage collectively. As the demand for your application keeps growing, so does your need to keep track of your AWS resources. AWS Config tracks […]

AWS CloudTrail can be used for security, monitoring restricted API calls, notification of threshold breaches, operational issues, filtering mechanisms for isolating data, faster root cause identification, and speedy resolution. CloudTrail can also be used for various compliance and governance controls, by helping you achieve compliance by logging API calls and changes to resources. Event selectors […]

If you are using AWS CloudFormation StackSets, you are having to manage your stacks from the AWS Organizations management account. According to best practice, the management account should be used only for tasks that require it. Until today, you had to use the management account to manage your AWS CloudFormation stack sets. To help limit […]

This blog post was contributed by Kanishk Mahajan, AWS and Maya Neelakandhan, CloudKnox As you migrate your workloads to the cloud or operate your existing workloads in the cloud it would be ideal if every application was deployed with the exact permissions that it required. In practice, however, the effort required to determine the precise […]

Organizations use multiple environments, each with different security and compliance controls, as part of their deployment pipeline. Following the principle of least privilege, production environments have the most restrictive security and compliance controls. They tightly limit who can access the environment and which actions each user (or principal) can perform. Development and test environments also […]

This post is the last in a series on how to build customizations using AWS CloudFormation. In part 1, we introduced you to cfn-response and crhelper and discussed the scenarios they are best suited for. In part 2, we addressed a coverage gap in our public roadmap and showed you how to build an AWS […]

This post is the second in a series on how to build customizations using AWS CloudFormation. In part 1, we showed you how to develop customizations using cfn-response and crhelper and shared the scenarios they are best suited for. In this post, we’ll use AWS CloudFormation macros to address some of the coverage gaps identified […]

Customers who manage multiple AWS accounts in AWS Organizations can use service control policies (SCPs) to centrally manage permissions in their environment. SCPs can be applied to an organization unit (OU), account, or entire organization to restrict the maximum permissions that can be applied in the scoped AWS accounts. In this post, we are going to explore the use of SCPs to restrict an AWS account to read-only access.