Know Before You Go – AWS re:Invent 2023 Cloud Governance and Compliance

We are so excited to see you at our annual cloud computing conference, AWS re:Invent 2023, in Las Vegas from Nov 27 to Dec 1. Whether you’re a seasoned re:Invent veteran or a first-timer, the excitement and opportunities of AWS re:Invent never cease to amaze.

With a total of 96 sessions covering the solution areas that make up AWS Cloud Operations— Monitoring and Observability, Centralized Operations Management, Compliance and Auditing, and Cloud Governance— the AWS Cloud Operations track promises a wealth of insights, best practices, and fun kiosk activities to elevate your cloud management skills to new heights.

For the purpose of this blog, we’ll be highlighting Cloud Governance and Compliance and Auditing: two solution areas within Cloud Operations that help organizations assess risks, centralize their compliance and audit data, and use automation to improve their security and compliance posture. AWS cloud governance helps you align your AWS cloud use with your business objectives while AWS cloud compliance helps you meet regulatory requirements, standards, laws, and industry frameworks.

Cloud Ops Kiosk at the AWS Village:

In addition to attending sessions, come visit our Cloud Operations kiosk in the AWS Village at the Expo in the Venetian (campus map). Come spin the prize wheel to win swag, meet our experts, and learn about the future of cloud operations.

To gain a better understanding of cloud governance and compliance, learn about our kiosks and top recommended sessions below, and make sure to favorite these sessions in the session catalogue.

Top 10 Cloud Governance and Compliance Sessions to Attend:

COP207 | Don’t let cloud compliance and operations exceed your budget – Chalk Talk

In this chalk talk, learn how to continuously optimize costs while building modern, scalable architectures that meet your compliance and operations needs. Walk through various best practices and recommendations for optimizing AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail usage. Explore multiple use cases that result in optimal spend, and learn how using AWS best practices can help in these scenarios. Come with your questions!

COP209 | How to customize AWS compliance and auditing services – Breakout Session

Security operations, compliance, and auditing can be challenging to set up, especially in a way that makes it easy to visualize, manage, and respond to everything happening. And sometimes using fully managed services can help reduce risk but limit innovation. See how to use AWS Config, through AWS Security Hub, AWS CloudTrail Lake, and AWS Control Tower to set up an environment that sets you up for operational and compliance success.

COP304 | Customizing accounts swiftly and securely with AWS Control Tower – Chalk Talk 

As you build out a multi-account environment with AWS Control Tower, you need to preconfigure your accounts with standard platform customizations for networking, security, identity, and compliance. In this chalk talk, learn how you can use different automation options to implement consistent platform tooling and resources across your accounts. Also discover best practices for building out controls, policies, and permission boundaries using AWS Control Tower and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to achieve a decentralized and scalable environment for your organization.

COP311 | Simplify continuous auditing and compliance on AWS – Workshop

This workshop walks through the steps you can take with AWS cloud operations services to centralize and simplify continuous auditing and compliance across AWS Regions and accounts. Start by learning how to use AWS Systems Manager Explorer to gather the compliance status of AWS Config rules. Next, learn how to use AWS Systems Manager Automation documents (runbooks) to automate the remediation of any noncompliant AWS Config rules. Finally, use AWS Audit Manager to collect the evidence from this process to prepare for audits. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP315 | Architecting AWS Accounts for scale – Chalk Talk 

This chalk talk focuses on best practices for architecting multiple accounts, including account configuration, controls management, and establishing security boundaries via AWS accounts, AWS Organizations, and AWS Control Tower. Learn how following these best practices can help you manage your business applications and data more easily and achieve operational excellence, security, and reliability while optimizing your costs.

COP318 | Best practices for cloud governance – Breakout Session

It can be challenging to determine where to start, how to manage hybrid or regulated environments, or how to onboard an entire organization to the cloud. In this session, learn best practices in cloud governance for building a well-architected, scalable foundation on AWS, including strategies for permission management, secure workload deployments, and environment governance. Discover insights AWS has learned from organizations that have successfully adopted the cloud.

COP328 | How to manage applications at scale and innovate faster with AWS – Breakout Session

Managing an ever-growing number of application resources can become increasingly difficult whether you’re an engineer supporting an application, an IT administrator monitoring application security, a financial analyst investigating application spend, or an operations specialist maintaining application reliability. Come learn how AWS services and tools make it easier to simplify application management so you can remediate issues quickly, innovate faster, save time, and scale securely. Learn how you can manage application performance in Amazon CloudWatch, improve security posture with AWS Security Hub, optimize costs with AWS Cost Explorer, and drive operational excellence across your applications with AWS Systems Manager.

COP331 | Implementing end-to-end compliance on AWS, featuring BMW – Breakout Session

Today, organizations are challenged with balancing compliance and security requirements. In this session, walk through an end-to-end experience for defining and maintaining the security and compliance of your AWS resources. Learn about tools you can use to author and automate controls and review and remediate noncompliance in your environment. See how to integrate several services, such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Config, AWS Security Hub, AWS Control Tower, and AWS Systems Manager to help you keep your resources compliant.

COP333 | Optimize costs in your multi-account environments – Breakout Session

Customers migrating to the cloud or scaling in the cloud want to optimize costs and reduce spend while maximizing their business impact. In this session, discover the best practices and recommendations for you to optimize costs efficiently and at scale in a multi-account AWS environment (AWS Control Tower, AWS Organizations). No matter where you are in your cloud journey, learn how you can implement controls and apply cost-reduction strategies, such as tagging and using tools like AWS Compute Optimizer, for your workloads and resources.

COP338 | Using generative AI to improve your compliance and auditing processes – Chalk Talk 

Managing compliance can be a tedious process, but it’s necessary in order to be audit ready. To free up resources for innovation, you can pair services like AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail with Amazon CodeWhisperer to help you build custom compliance rules more quickly and query your audit logs more effectively. When it’s time for your audit, you can also use CodeWhisperer to help you query your audit evidence in CloudTrail. Join this chalk talk to learn how generative AI on AWS can make compliance and auditing processes faster and more efficient.

COP340 | What’s new with AWS governance and compliance – Breakout Session 

When you set up an environment that is optimized for governance and compliance, you can increase your productivity and operational efficiency. This in turn allows you to focus on delivering business outcomes and saving time and cost. Join this session to find out how AWS is innovating in the governance and compliance space. Learn about recent launches and how you can use them to solve a variety of challenges.

Note: Breakout sessions consist of one or more speakers presenting content to a large audience. Workshops are interactive sessions where attendees work in small groups to build a solution to a problem using AWS. Chalk talks are highly interactive and begin with a short lecture delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a 45–50-minute whiteboarding and Q&A session. Builders’ sessions are small-group sessions led by one AWS expert that start with a short demonstration followed up attendees experimenting and building with the AWS expert.

Key Takeaways

By attending the recommended sections and meeting our experts at our kiosks, you can learn the best practices for cloud governance and compliance. This will help you adhere to your security, operational, regulatory, and cost standards, while positioning you to innovate and move faster. Finally, we hope that you can find some time to take a break and have fun with us at our kiosk.

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