Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Public sector organizations around the world share a common concern: how can they make sure their digital transformation maintains data security? The question comes up often when I meet with government leaders around the world in my role as a government transformation digital advisor at AWS. During my time in the UK Government’s Digital Service (GDS), and now in my work with government leaders, I’ve learned important lessons about transforming services securely in the cloud. Read on for some key takeaways.

Cybersecurity analytics is a systematic methodology designed to collect, ingest, process, aggregate, and analyze security events. This methodology empowers organizations to proactively perform security investigations, powered by advanced analytics and machine learning (ML), which help mitigate cyber issues more effectively and efficiently at scale. Learn about the core components of a cybersecurity analytics framework and how organizations can use AWS to design a cybersecurity analytics platform with analytics and ML services.

At Amazon, we believe cybersecurity skills training and workforce development are essential to addressing cybersecurity challenges. Leading into Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Amazon hosted Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), for a roundtable with leaders across higher education, state and local government, and private industry to discuss ways to develop the cybersecurity workforce through skills training, partnerships between government and industry, and creating pathways to cybersecurity careers. Learn more about how Amazon supports cybersecurity training.

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.

AWS announced the availability of Wickr RAM (Recall, Alert and Messaging) to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) through Cloud One, which is a cloud hosting infrastructure and service. Wickr RAM is an end-to-end encrypted full suite collaboration application built for the warfighter. It is available on AWS GovCloud (US) and can support workloads up to Impact Level 5.

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.

In July 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released a cloud native access point (CNAP) reference design that follows zero trust architecture (ZTA) principles and provides a new approach to access mission owner (MO) applications. The DoD’s reference design discusses four core capabilities of CNAP: authenticated and authorized entities (C1), authorized ingress (C2), authorized egress (C3), and security monitoring and compliance enforcement (C4). In this blog post, we walk through how to establish the C2 component via a virtual internet access point (vIAP) with AWS. The proposed architectures can reduce operational cost and management overhead, while improving the accessibility, resiliency, and security of mission owner applications.

Since signing a framework agreement with the Government of Canada (GC) in 2019, AWS has developed an open source solution to automate the deployment of security controls for GC customers, which can reduce the time it takes to achieve an Authority to Operate (ATO). Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) used this solution to implement their cloud landing zone controls aligned with the Protected B, Medium Integrity, Medium Availability (PBMM) profile. They worked with AWS Partner Kainos to complete an ATO evidence package in only 60 days—a process that typically takes 18 months.

ONE is a global movement to end extreme poverty and preventable disease by 2030. Advocacy is about taking action in real time, so we need to reach people wherever they are. In Africa, that means using mobile devices. To help us reach audiences across Africa, we launched a mobile chatbot built on AWS.

This blog post explores the options US public sector customers and their business partners should evaluate when selecting an AWS partition. We discuss the differences between AWS GovCloud (US) and the AWS standard partition and how to decide which partition may be the best match for your organization’s security, compliance, and availability needs.