AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

¬Field Notes: Cross-account deployments in an AWS Control Tower environment

Field Notes: Cross-account deployments in an AWS Control Tower environment

AWS Control Tower helps customers put an orchestration layer on top of a multi-account strategy. When customers build applications, they often use separate accounts as part of a deployment pipeline so that they can validate changes before production. This best practice helps reduce blast radius should there be any issues with newer iterations. With AWS […]

Using an AWS Service Catalog service action to allow end users to update resources after deployment

Enterprise customers with multiple users want to manage policies on cloud resources like AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to grant access to additional users after the product has been deployed through, for example, AWS CloudFormation templates. In addition, customers want to accomplish this task in a self-service […]

Integrate across the Three Lines Model (Part 1): Build a custom automation of AWS Audit Manager with AWS Security Hub

The Three Lines Model developed by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) helps organizations identify structures and processes to facilitate strong governance and risk management. In that model, the first-line function manages risk, the second-line function oversees risk and the third-line function provides objective and independent assurance of risk management. According to a Deloitte analysis […]

Diagnose and remediate AWS Security Hub findings with AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter and Explorer

In this post, we will show you how to configure AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter to aggregate security findings from AWS Security Hub into OpsCenter as operational issues. OpsCenter helps operations engineers and IT professionals reduce issue resolution time by providing a central place to view, investigate, and resolve security issues.  AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides […]

Self-service VPCs in AWS Control Tower using AWS Service Catalog

One of the first tasks my customers do when creating a new AWS account is to create the right network integration for their enterprise. Typically, this means implementing an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) across a multi-account framework that was provisioned with AWS Control Tower. When these are provisioned in a self-service model, we see […]

AWS CloudTrail Best Practices

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. AWS CloudTrail gives you a history of AWS calls for your account, including API calls made through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, and command line tools. As a result, you can identify: Which users and accounts called AWS APIs […]

AWS Network Firewall logs are ingested into CloudWatch and analyzed through Contributor Insights and CloudWatch Logs Insights.

Use Contributor Insights to analyze AWS Network Firewall

AWS recently launched AWS Network Firewall, a stateful, managed network firewall that provides intrusion detection and prevention for Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). In a large-scale enterprise environment, it can be difficult and time-consuming to inspect multiple log groups and log streams. Investigating a security incident across a Network Firewall fleet that spans different VPCs […]

Automate suspension of an AWS CodePipeline release during critical events using AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar and Amazon EventBridge

In this blog post, I show you how to set up public holidays calendars using AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar and suspend your AWS CodePipeline pipelines during the critical holidays in these calendar events. For example, let’s say an application release pipeline in your AWS account builds and deploys a new version of the application […]

Latest from AWS Organizations

The latest from AWS Organizations (Spring 2021)

AWS Organizations provides features customers can use to manage their AWS environment across accounts. When paired with other AWS services, AWS Organizations helps you manage permissions, create and share resources, govern your environment, and centrally control your security requirements. Here’s what the team has been up to since our virtual 2020 re:Invent season. Use attribute-based […]

AWS Health Aware – Customize AWS Health Alerts for Organizational and Personal AWS Accounts

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 […]