New – AWS Audit Manager now supports first third-party GRC integration

Auditing is a continuous and ongoing process, and every audit includes the collection of evidence. The evidence gathered helps confirm the state of resources and it’s used to demonstrate that the customer’s policies, procedures, and activities (controls), are in place, and that the control has been operational for a specified period of time. AWS Audit Manager already automates this evidence collection for AWS usage. However, large enterprise organizations who deploy their workloads across a range of locations such as cloud, on-premises, or a combination of both, manage this evidence data using a combination of third-party or homegrown tools, spreadsheets, and emails.

Today we’re excited to announce the integration of AWS Audit Manager with third party Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) provider, MetricStream CyberGRC, an AWS Partner with GRC capabilities. This integration allows enterprises to manage compliance across AWS, on-premises, and other cloud environments in a centralized GRC environment.

Before this announcement, Audit Manager operated only in the AWS context, allowing customers to collect compliance evidence for resources in AWS. They would then relay that information to their GRC systems external to AWS for additional aggregation and analysis. This process left customers without an automated way to monitor and evaluate all compliance data in one centralized location, resulting in delays to compliance outcomes.

The GRC integration with Audit Manager allows you to use audit evidence collected by Audit Manager directly in MetricStream CyberGRC. Audit Manager now receives the controls in scope from MetricStream CyberGRC, collects evidence around these controls, and exports the data related to the audit into MetricStream CyberGRC for aggregation and analysis. You will now have aggregated compliance, real-time monitoring and centralized reporting. This will reduce compliance fatigue and improve stakeholder collaboration.

How It Works
Using Amazon Cognito User Pools, you’ll be onboarded into the multi-tenant instance of MetricStream CyberGRC.

Amazon Cognito User Pools

Once onboarded, you’ll be able to view AWS assets and frameworks inside MetricStream CyberGRC. You can then begin by choosing the suitable Audit Manager framework to define the relationships between your existing enterprise controls and AWS controls. After creating this one-time control mapping, you can define the accounts in scope to create an assessment that MetricStream CyberGRC will manage in AWS Audit Manager on your behalf. This assessment triggers AWS Audit Manager to collect evidence in context of the mapped controls. As a result, you get a unified view of compliance evidence inside your GRC application. Any standard controls that you have in Audit Manager will be provided to MetricStream CyberGRC by using the GetControl API to facilitate manual mapping process wherever automated mapping fails or does not suffice. The EvidenceFinder API will send bulk evidence from Audit Manager to MetricStream CyberGRC.

Available Now
This feature is available today where Audit Manager (AWS Regions) and MetricStream CyberGRC are both available. There are no additional AWS Audit Manager charges for using this integration. To use this integration, please reach out to MetricStream for information about access and purchase of MetricStream CyberGRC software.

As part of the AWS Free Tier, AWS Audit Manager offers a free tier for first-time customers. The free tier will expire in two calendar months after the first subscription. For more information, see AWS Audit Manager pricing. To learn more about AWS Audit Manager integration with MetricStream CyberGRC, see Audit Manager documentation.

– Veliswa