AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Know Before You Go – AWS re:Invent 2024 Cloud Governance and Compliance

We are so excited to see you at our annual cloud computing conference, AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas from Dec 2 to Dec 6. At AWS re:Invent, cloud enthusiasts from all over the world will gather together to collaborate and learn from one another! You will have the opportunity to meet with AWS experts, attend technical sessions, explore our community events, and much more.

In this blog, we will be highlighting sessions focused on Cloud Governance and Compliance, two solution areas within cloud operations that enable your organization to move faster while helping you adhere to security, operational, compliance, and cost standards. With cloud governance and compliance, you can cultivate agility by accelerating the provisioning of workloads with purpose-built controls, operate in a dynamic regulatory environment, streamline mergers and acquisitions, and improve developer productivity.

AWS re:Invent offers learning sessions in a variety of formats and levels so that you can expand your knowledge and grow your skills at a pace that is right for you. Levels are indicated by the session ID. Learn more about re:Invent session types.

Depending on where you are in your cloud governance and compliance journey, you may benefit from some of the following sessions.

Author’s Pick

Setting up controls for your cloud environment is an important step in creating a well-architected cloud foundation. Our author’s pick is the chalk talk, COP342, which provides insights into leveraging robust security controls and achieving compliance objectives leveraging AWS services. Regardless of where you are in your journey, remaining well-architected and having a strong security posture is a top priority. This is critical to us when engaging with customers in highly regulated industries that we support like financial services and healthcare. We are highlighting this chalk talk, which will cover how to use AWS services to centrally define, enforce, and monitor policies across your environment.

COP342 | Top controls for a secure, well-architected environment – Chalk Talk

Organizations of all sizes must implement robust controls to mitigate risks and operate a well-architected environment. Discover top recommended controls that can help you achieve your governance, compliance, and security objectives. Learn how to leverage AWS services like AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, AWS Config, and AWS Security Hub to centrally define, enforce, and monitor policies across your environment. Explore strategies to establish comprehensive access controls, prevent misconfigurations, and gain visibility into your security posture. Understand how to adapt controls as your environment evolves, while addressing emerging threats and changing business requirements.

Additional Governance and Compliance Sessions to Attend

COP326 | Unlocking business insights with AWS Config ft. Itaú Unibanco – Breakout Session

Organizations, with a highly distributed technology landscape scale on AWS, face challenges such as extracting configuration metadata, versioning, and compliance from thousands of individual pipelines, resources, and services. By using AWS Config as a source of resource metadata, customers can get compliance monitoring, change tracking, and visibility into resource relationships across accounts and AWS Regions. In this session, Itaú Unibanco will showcase how they leverage AWS Config for metadata centralization to identify cost inefficiencies, outage causes, back-level technology, and compliance issues of millions of resources in thousands of accounts.

COP327 | Accelerating auditing and compliance for generative AI on AWS – Breakout Session

Generative AI brings exciting new innovations, but it also presents challenges regarding responsible usage and compliance. This session guides you through the journey of a generative AI application and how AWS can provide visibility that your use of Amazon Bedrock and other related services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), follows best practices for compliance and governance. Explore AWS governance and compliance services, like AWS Organizations, AWS Audit Manager, and AWS CloudTrail, that can assist you in continuously auditing your generative AI infrastructure. Learn how these services automate audit evidence collection and provide audit-ready reports to meet your compliance and audit needs.

COP383 | Achieving governance at scale – Breakout Session

As businesses scale their cloud operations, maintaining consistent enforcement of policies and standards becomes increasingly complex. This breakout session will delve into the powerful capabilities of AWS Control Tower, AWS Config, and AWS Organizations, providing attendees with a comprehensive understanding of how to achieve governance at scale. You will learn how to integrate AWS services to automate governance processes, streamline incident response, and enforce security best practices across AWS environments. You will also hear from a customer and their governance journey on AWS.

COP402 | Dive deep on AWS Cloud Governance – Breakout Session

As organizations rapidly adopt cloud computing, the need for effective governance has become paramount. In this deep dive session, we will explore the advanced strategies and underlying AWS services for implementing robust cloud governance on AWS. You will learn about AWS services and strategies to apply governance in your environment, focusing on account design, security controls, audit reporting, and automation.

COP338 | Architecting AWS Accounts for Scale – Chalk Talk 

This session will focus on best practices for managing accounts including account configuration, domain control, and establishing security boundaries via AWS Accounts, AWS Organizations, and AWS Control Tower, so that you can manage your business applications and data more easily, and achieve operational excellence, security, reliability while optimizing your costs.

COP343 | Best practices for cloud governance – Chalk Talk 

As businesses adopt to the cloud, cloud governance has emerged as a critical, yet complex, priority. Whether you are new to the cloud or have an established presence, navigating the tradeoffs between agility and control can be daunting. In this chalk talk, AWS experts will share strategies to build an effective and scalable cloud governance foundation, including strategies for permission management, secure workload deployments, and environment governance. Join AWS and your peers to share and learn insights from organizations that have successfully adopted the cloud.

COP346 | Centralize audit data for hybrid and multicloud environments – Chalk Talk 

As customers accelerate their migrations to the cloud and transform their businesses, some find themselves in situations where they must manage IT operations in hybrid environments. Does this sound like you? In this chalk talk, we will walk you through how to enable AWS CloudTrail Lake, import historical CloudTrail logs, and aggregate your audit logs from partner integrations, custom solutions and many AWS resources. We will also discuss how to query this data for investigative analysis and security purposes.

COP349 | Implement controls faster with generative AI – Chalk Talk 

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

COP405 | Coding for account customizations with AWS Control Tower – Code Talk 

Join us as we demonstrate through live coding and interactive discussion how to apply baseline configurations and account customizations across your multi-account AWS environment at scale. In this session, we will dive deep into some real-world examples and explore how you can customize across 100s or even 1000s of accounts securely. In addition, we will show you how Amazon Q enables infrastructure as code to help implement customization quickly.

COP311 | Simplify and automate continuous compliance with AWS – Workshop

Attend this hands-on workshop to learn how to use AWS services to streamline continuous auditing and compliance processes across AWS Regions and accounts. We will use AWS Config and AWS Systems Manager Explorer to aggregate and visualize compliance data from multiple regions/accounts. You will explore how to automate the remediation of noncompliant resources using AWS Config conformance packs and via AWS Systems Manager Automation documents. You will also learn how to use natural language query generation powered by generative AI in AWS Config (preview) to simplify the investigation and search of AWS resource configurations and compliance metadata. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Conclusion

In this blog, we highlighted some Cloud Governance and Compliance sessions for you to attend! We look forward to seeing you at these sessions. Visit the Cloud Governance and Compliance Kiosk, in the AWS Village at the Expo in the Venetian, if you have more questions or want a deeper dive. To learn more about our sessions, please visit our re:Invent events sessions page.

About the authors:

Tiffany Chen

Tiffany Chen is a Solutions Architect on the CSC team at AWS, focusing on the healthcare and life sciences industry. She has supported AWS customers with their deployment workloads and currently works with Enterprise customers to build well-architected and cost-optimized solutions. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, gardening, baking, and watching basketball.

Winnie Chen

Winnie Chen is a Solutions Architect at AWS supporting enterprise greenfield customers, focusing on the financial services industry. She has helped customers migrate and build their infrastructure on AWS. In her free time, she enjoys traveling and spending time outdoors through activities like hiking, biking and rock climbing.