Tag: AWS Config

As government organizations transition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), they often seek to maintain operational continuity by using their existing on-premises firewall solutions. Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) enables seamless integration of these firewall appliances into the AWS architecture, ensuring consistent security policies and minimizing disruptions. This post explores best practices for implementing GWLB to facilitate centralized traffic inspection for both east-west and north-south traffic flows.

In January 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) inaugurated a Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The CIC uses emerging technologies to solve real-world problems and has produced more than 50 prototypes in sectors like healthcare, education, and research. The Centre’s work has involved 300-plus AWS accounts across various groups, including external collaborators, UBC staff, students, and researchers. This post discusses the management of AWS in higher education institutions, emphasizing governance to securely foster innovation without compromising security and detailing policies and responsibilities for managing AWS accounts across projects and research.

Healthcare organizations worldwide are leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) and partner solutions to modernize, transform, and innovate their businesses. Ensuring the availability and security of critical applications is paramount. For example, two renowned German medical facilities, Fachklinikum Mainschleife and Max Grundig Klinik, needed to modernize their IT infrastructure to comply with stringent regulatory requirements outlined in the country’s Law for Accelerating the Digitalization of Healthcare (DigiG). Reliable and compliant service offerings from AWS enabled the medical facilities to provide reliable access to essential systems.

In this post, we explore the complexities of data privacy and controls on Amazon Web Services (AWS), examine how creating a landing zone within which to contain such data is important, and highlight the differences between creating a landing zone from scratch compared with using the AWS Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) for Healthcare. To aid explanation, we use a simple healthcare workload as an example. We also explain how LZA for Healthcare codifies HIPAA controls and AWS Security Best Practices to accelerate the creation of an environment to run protective health information workloads in AWS.

The US Office of Management and Budget published M-21-31, a memorandum for federal government agencies to define event logging requirements related to cybersecurity incidents. These guidelines aim to support the detection, investigation, and remediation of cyber incidents on federal information systems. The memorandum defines various event logging (EL) tiers and the log data that must be captured for various log categories. Learn the services from AWS that have been called out explicitly in the memorandum for logging and retention requirements at the EL1 level, and the resources you can use to set up these services to capture the required log data.

It is essential for election campaigns and committees to have access to the latest security services so they can mitigate risks against security threats at minimal cost. To support this, AWS is collaborating with Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC) to offer more than 20 cybersecurity-related AWS services for low-to-no cost to all active and registered national party committees and federal candidate committees for the US House and US Senate midterm elections that are eligible in accordance with DDC and Federal Election Commission (FEC) criteria.

To help our Australian customers, AWS provides pre-built conformance packs for the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Essential Eight Maturity Model and the ACSC Information Security Manual (ISM). The ACSC’s Essential Eight was first published in 2017 and is a set of prioritised security mitigation strategies designed to help protect organisations against various security threats. In this blog post, I walk you through how to set up a conformance pack in AWS Config that is designed to help you implement and track the ASCS Essential Eight model.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released an interim rule, the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Assessing Contractor Implementation of Cybersecurity Requirements (DFARS Case 2019–D041), which includes NIST SP 800-171 and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) assessment methodology and requirements. Organizations have been planning for CMMC, and with the release of this interim rule, are now beginning to prepare and build strategy for CMMC compliance. Learn how you can build your CMMC strategy using cloud technologies.

Serverless applications are typically discreet pieces of code that customers can use to manage security-related processes or stitch together multiple AWS services to solve a larger problem. They allow customers to build and run applications and services without dealing with infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning. In this blog, I explain the serverless computing model, the Serverless Application Repository (SAR), solution constructs and implementations, why they matter to our government customers, and how they can use them to solve common problems.

As government agencies and public sector organizations modernize their IT and migrate to the AWS Cloud, the ability to gain a full, clear view of the security of their environments is a primary challenge they experience. This lack of visibility leads to blind spots and gaps in their security posture, leaving opportunity for security issues to arise. As a result, AWS developed a new open source Self-Service Security Assessment (with ransomware analysis modules) tool that provides customers with a point-in-time assessment to quickly gain valuable insights into the security posture of their AWS account.