Building a Scalable and Secure FedRAMP-Compliant Cloud Environment: Socure’s Proven Strategies with AWS and Complementary Tools

At Socure, we’re committed to leading the way in identity verification and fraud prevention. We’ve developed a FedRAMP-compliant environment from the ground up using our Socure ID+ for Government (“SocureGov”) solution. In this blog post, we’ll delve into Socure’s journey of building a FedRAMP-compliant cloud infrastructure from the ground up that uses a comprehensive suite of AWS services, enhanced by key third-party tools such as Sumo Logic, Istio, Terraform, and Trend Micro, to create a modern, secure, scalable, and compliant cloud infrastructure architecture right from Day 1.

AWS Services: A synergistic approach to compliance

AWS offers an incredibly robust ecosystem of FedRAMP-authorized services in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions that form the backbone of our FedRAMP-compliant environment. By strategically integrating these services, we’ve built a cohesive security architecture that meets the stringent standards required for government data protection.

Foundational security and compliance

Our security strategy is anchored by services such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config. Together, these services help us make sure that our data is encrypted, our actions are logged, and our configurations are continuously monitored. AWS KMS helps us protect sensitive information by handling encryption for data at rest and in transit. Amazon CloudTrail provides us with a comprehensive audit trail by logging every API call, which is essential for compliance, and AWS Config continuously checks that all resources meet FedRAMP’s strict security configurations.

Advanced threat detection and response

Complementing our foundational services are Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and AWS WAF. Amazon GuardDuty offers us real-time threat detection by monitoring the environment for malicious activity. With AWS Security Hub, we can aggregate and prioritize security alerts across all our AWS services, prompting a unified response to potential threats. AWS WAF provides an additional layer of protection by blocking malicious traffic before it can impact our systems.

Operational excellence and monitoring

To maintain high operational standards, we rely heavily on Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Lambda. With Amazon CloudWatch, we can monitor the health and performance of all our AWS resources, providing actionable insights that allow us to quickly address any issues. Meanwhile, Lambda helps automate compliance tasks, such as enforcing encryption policies and helping keep our environment secure and compliant without requiring manual intervention.

Key AWS services in our modern technology stack

Beyond security and compliance, our technology stack is enhanced by various AWS services that boost performance and scalability. Services such as Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), and Amazon Pinpoint are integral to our messaging and notification systems, providing reliable communication between our applications. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) form the core of our data management and storage solutions, offering scalability and reliability. Amazon Aurora is used for high-performance transactional workloads, fostering fast and reliable database operations.

As part of our modern stack, we use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to manage our containerized applications. EKS enables us to run microservices-based architectures with high availability. With automated patching, monitoring, and security features, EKS allows us to focus on improving and augmenting our product features while AWS handles the underlying infrastructure while ensuring compliance with FedRAMP standard.

For large-scale data processing and real-time analytics, we use Amazon Kinesis and Amazon EMR, which allow us to process and analyze streaming data in real time, enabling data-driven decisions efficiently.

Complementary tools: Extending AWS capabilities

While AWS services form the foundation of our FedRAMP-compliant environment, we’ve found that augmenting them with a suite of complementary tools has been key to maintaining compliance and operational excellence.

Infrastructure Automation Made Easy with Terraform – Terraform plays a critical role in our operations by ensuring that our AWS infrastructure deployments are standardized, repeatable, and compliant with FedRAMP requirements. By codifying our infrastructure as code, we eliminate the risk of human error and configuration drift, guaranteeing that every deployment adheres to our defined standards and provides a clear audit trail for every change made.

Enhanced monitoring and analysis with Sumo Logic – Sumo Logic integrates seamlessly with AWS services such as CloudWatch and CloudTrail, providing us with advanced log aggregation and real-time analytics. We can then detect and respond to security events with greater speed and accuracy, making sure that we meet FedRAMP’s stringent logging and monitoring requirements.

Secure service mesh management with Istio – In our Kubernetes-based microservices architecture, Istio works alongside Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to provide fine-grained control over service-to-service communication. Istio’s robust security features, including mutual TLS and policy enforcement, provide secure microservice interactions, adding another layer of compliance to our environment.

Comprehensive host security with Trend Micro – Trend Micro complements AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty by providing enhanced protection at the host level. Its advanced threat detection capabilities ensure that our Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are safeguarded against both known and emerging threats, reinforcing our overall security posture.

Achieving FedRAMP compliance from Day 1

By leveraging AWS services in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions along with complementary tools, we have built a FedRAMP-compliant environment at Socure that is secure, scalable, and meets compliance requirements from the start. Through the shared responsibility model, we have inherited over 46 FedRAMP-required security controls from AWS GovCloud, accelerating our compliance journey and readiness for a FedRAMP assessment. We successfully completed our FedRAMP assessment by a Third-Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) with no significant findings and achieved our FedRAMP Agency Authorization in record time. This integrated approach ensures that government agencies can confidently adopt cloud technologies while adhering to the highest standards of security and compliance.

Key takeaways

• Our strategic integration of AWS GovCloud services like KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub, and CloudWatch creates a secure, compliant foundation.
• Complementary tools like Terraform, Sumo Logic, and Istio extend AWS capabilities, fostering consistency, enhanced monitoring, and secure service communication.
• At Socure, our integrated approach guarantees a FedRAMP-compliant environment from Day 1, providing government agencies with the confidence to securely adopt cloud technologies.

Conclusion

Socure has developed a FedRAMP-compliant environment built on a foundation of AWS services and third-party tools to create a modern, secure, scalable, and compliant cloud infrastructure architecture. To get started building your FedRAMP-compliant infrastructure, contact your AWS account team or the AWS Public Sector team.