AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: Harshvardhan Chunawala
Harshvardhan is an AWS Golden Jacket awardee and an AWS Solutions Architect, as well as an AWS Academy Authorized Educator. He partners with large enterprise leaders, startup founders, and C-suite executives globally to architect scalable, secure cloud infrastructure on AWS across diverse industries. At AWS, he serves as a Technical Field Community member of Security, Aerospace, AI/ML, Education/Research, and ISV. He leads cross-functional efforts across multiple Amazon teams, including Amazon Leo, Amazon Security, and AWS Agentic AI, among others, to shape and deliver frontier cloud capabilities in security, satellite, and trustworthy agentic AI services. A globally recognized technologist and expert in cloud security with over a decade of experience, Harshvardhan is an advisory board member, Visiting Faculty member, and researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), mentoring the next generation of cloud professionals and entrepreneurs. Harshvardhan served as Space Mission Engineering Lead and Mission Operator at CMU for the United States' first lunar mission since Apollo 17, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program that forms the foundation of the Artemis missions. Harshvardhan is also a former researcher at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where he contributed to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects in advanced scientific and computing research. Away from the keyboard, he pursues his love of the skies through skydiving and flying planes.
An incident response playbook for satellite operations on AWS (Part-1): Detection and forensic readiness
In this post, the first in a two-part series, we focus on the detection and forensic readiness side of satellite IR. This post walks through instrumenting your ground segment with Amazon Web Services (AWS) security services and AWS Ground Station so that threats surface before they cause damage, and forensic data is already flowing when an incident occurs.
An incident response playbook for satellite operations on AWS (Part-2): Automated response and recovery
This blog covers what to do when those detections fire. Satellite incident response (IR) must account for constraints that ground-based systems never face: containment actions that wait for the next orbital pass, decisions that trade mission continuity against security, and recovery procedures where the compromised endpoint cannot be physically accessed. It walks through containment, eradication, recovery, automated runbooks, and tabletop exercises designed for satellite operations teams.