IENAI SPACE validates 360™ space mission analysis software with AWS Foundational Technical Review

Spanish space-tech company IENAI SPACE put its cloud-based mission analysis platform, 360™, through the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR)—and came out stronger. In this post, we explore how the FTR process helped the team harden per-tenant data isolation and encryption, build a continuous software-supply-chain security pipeline, and formalize backup and recovery objectives, all while running on AWS. Discover how completing the review not only validated 360™’s multi-tenant SaaS architecture against AWS best practices, but also opened the door to AWS Marketplace and the AWS ISV Accelerate Program. It’s a practical look at how a growing ISV turns a technical checkpoint into a deeper commercial partnership with AWS.

IENAI SPACE is a Spanish space technology company that builds space mobility products and services for the next generation of small satellites, empowering a sustainable new space economy. Its end-to-end ecosystem includes hardware products (ATHENA™ electric propulsion systems) and software services (360™).

360™ is a single cloud-based platform that helps mission teams model, simulate, and optimize complete space missions faster and more collaboratively. Built on a high-fidelity digital-twin engine, 360™ helps engineers perform orbit propagation, flight and attitude dynamics, maneuver and propulsion design, power analysis, constellation and coverage studies, communications and ground-station analysis, and uncertainty analysis with configurable perturbation models, all within one integrated environment. Teams no longer need to move between disconnected tools and scripts, and the same workflow carries them from early feasibility studies to detailed operations planning.

The platform is available in two complementary forms:

• 360™ Studio – A guided, no-code web interface that helps users run advanced mission analyses without writing custom software, through pre-built analysis packages and interactive 2D/3D visualizations.
• 360™ Library – A Python package for experienced engineers who need maximum flexibility to build tailored simulations, extend models, and integrate 360™ directly into their own workflows and toolchains.

Why teams choose 360™

Teams adopt 360™ because it compresses mission design cycles while keeping engineering results they can trust. Four capabilities stand out:

• Faster mission design – Parallel cloud computing reduces propagation and simulation times by up to 50 percent compared with comparable industry tools, accelerating trade-offs and decision-making.
• Trusted engineering accuracy – The platform has been independently benchmarked against GMAT and STK for orbital dynamics, perturbation models, and geodetic calculations.
• Built-in optimization – AI-assisted maneuver and subsystem design, together with Monte Carlo analysis, helps improve mission robustness without relying on external optimization frameworks.
• Accessible and extensible – Teams can use the no-code interface for rapid adoption across multidisciplinary teams, or use the Python library for deep customization and automation.

How AWS powers 360™

Delivered as a software as a service (SaaS) solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS), 360™ provides on-demand scalability for compute-intensive simulations, centralized updates, and enterprise-grade security and compliance. Containerized workloads run on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which scales parallel simulation jobs on demand (up to 100 concurrent jobs on the largest subscription tier). Simulation outputs are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), tenant encryption keys are managed with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and fine-grained access is enforced through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). The entire solution runs in the Europe (Frankfurt) AWS Region, eu-central-1, to meet EU data residency requirements. This gives space companies secure, on-demand access to advanced mission engineering without the cost or complexity of managing high-performance infrastructure in-house, and it allows the subscription model to serve organizations ranging from universities and research groups to institutional and commercial mission-design teams.

AWS is also a strategic partner for IENAI SPACE beyond infrastructure. As an AWS Partner, IENAI SPACE submitted 360™ for the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) to validate its multi-tenant SaaS architecture against AWS best practices, unlock AWS Marketplace listing, and gain access to the AWS ISV Accelerate Program and its co-sell benefits.

In this post, we explore IENAI SPACE’s experience completing the FTR for 360™, and how it helped the team strengthen per-tenant data isolation and encryption (envelope encryption with per-tenant keys and EU-sovereign key management for GDPR-bound customers), establish a continuous software-supply-chain security pipeline (SBOM generation and CVE monitoring across every deployed service), and position 360™ for AWS Marketplace and AWS ISV Accelerate.

What is the AWS Foundational Technical Review?

The FTR defines a set of foundational best practices based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It features security controls to help prevent unauthorized access or leaks, minimize attack vectors, support traceability and logging, and more.

The review addresses sensitive data management and regulatory compliance, as well as business continuity and disaster recovery planning, to help maintain customer trust and avoid downtime and revenue loss.

Upon successful completion of the FTR, a partner is considered a “Validated” member of the AWS Partner Network (APN). At the “Validated” stage, partners have access to additional APN programs like AWS ISV Accelerate, the AWS Competency Program, and APN Customer Engagements (ACE), as well as a “Reviewed by AWS” badge, listings in AWS Partner Solutions Finder, and proof-of-concept funding.

For IENAI SPACE, the FTR was therefore both a technical checkpoint and the entry point to a deeper commercial partnership with AWS: a way to confirm that 360™ is built the way AWS recommends, and to take it to market alongside AWS.

Technical Improvements

The FTR process gave IENAI SPACE valuable insights to improve the security and operational posture of 360™. In each area, the team built on AWS services to address potential issues and make good practice systematic.

Area 1: Multi-tenant isolation and IAM

Like many SaaS independent software vendors (ISVs) whose multi-tenancy model matured organically alongside product growth, 360™’s data layer originally relied on shared infrastructure without company-scoped key boundaries, and Kubernetes workloads carried broader IAM permissions than strictly necessary for their function.

Through the FTR process, IENAI SPACE moved to a four-level key hierarchy: a primary key, a per-company data encryption key (DEK), a per-user DEK, and a per-simulation key. AWS KMS customer managed keys are tagged with the company ID, and an encryption context cryptographically binds each key to its tenant. Kubernetes pods on Amazon EKS now authenticate through IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA), with each API service account scoped to only the kms:Decrypt and kms:GenerateDataKey permissions for its own company’s keys. Kubernetes Secrets are sealed at rest and in Git using Sealed Secrets, integrated into the existing ArgoCD/GitOps pipeline.

For partners early in their own multi-tenancy journey, this pattern of per-tenant key scoping with AWS KMS and IRSA maps directly onto most Amazon EKS based SaaS architectures.

Area 2: Logging, monitoring, and observability

Many growth-stage ISVs share a common issue: security scanning exists, but it isn’t continuous or centrally visible. 360™ was no exception. Vulnerability tracking across its services had been manual and reactive, with no continuous, auditable record of which components shipped in each build or whether they carried known CVEs.

As part of its FTR improvements, every 360™ service now integrates a shared GitHub Actions composite pipeline that generates a CycloneDX SBOM (using Syft) on each build and continuously matches it against the NVD, OSV, and GHSA feeds through OWASP Dependency-Track, with a Grype-based quality gate enforced pre-merge and pre-deploy. The pipeline assumes short-lived AWS roles through OpenID Connect (OIDC), so long-lived credentials are not stored in repositories. Critical CVEs trigger a real-time alert to the DevOps team, and Vault’s audit backend streams key-access events to Loki, with Grafana dashboards providing tamper-evident, centralized visibility into every decrypt and access operation across the platform.

This kind of SBOM-based pipeline is increasingly relevant beyond the FTR alone: it also gets ahead of upcoming regulatory requirements such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Area 3: Backup, recovery, and data protection

Backup cadence and recovery objectives for 360™’s supporting infrastructure had not been formally defined or tested against a documented Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), an issue that’s easy to overlook until a formal review asks for the numbers in writing.

At the time of writing, core supporting services run nightly Proxmox Backup Server jobs with 30-day retention, meeting a defined 24-hour RPO. Simulation outputs in Amazon S3 and customer personal data in PostgreSQL are protected by envelope encryption (AES-256-GCM) with AWS KMS wrapped, per-tenant and per-simulation DEKs, and QuestDB’s underlying volume adds LUKS encryption as a further layer for telemetry data.

Because deleting a tenant’s company DEK renders that tenant’s data permanently unreadable, GDPR Article 17 “right to erasure” requests are satisfied without database-level deletion. This design choice also simplifies compliance conversations with regulated customers, including those in the space sector.

“Completing the AWS Foundational Technical Review pushed us to formalize practices we knew we needed but hadn’t yet made systematic, like proper tenant isolation, continuous vulnerability tracking, and defined recovery objectives. For a company operating in the space and defense industries, where customers rightly hold us to a high bar on data handling and mission assurance, that rigor isn’t optional; it’s part of what lets them trust us with their mission data in the first place. Building on AWS gave us the services to put those practices in place, and the partnership gives us a path to reach new customers through AWS Marketplace. I’d encourage any deep-tech startup weighing whether to pursue the FTR to treat it less as a compliance checkbox and more as a forcing function to mature your architecture before you scale.”

— Jorge Ariza, Software Product Manager, IENAI SPACE

Business benefits and compliance

The FTR helped IENAI SPACE achieve its compliance goals for 360™ by recommending the latest security and operational processes, which are critical for a company serving the highly regulated space industry. Combined with AWS infrastructure and the AWS Partner programs, the results show up in three areas:

• Evidence-backed compliance on AWS infrastructure –Space-sector customers routinely operate under export-control regimes like ITAR and EAR, alongside GDPR obligations for any EU-based mission data. 360™ runs in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region to meet EU data residency requirements, and the FTR reinforced the encryption, access control, and audit practices built on AWS KMS, IAM, and Amazon S3. IENAI SPACE now has concrete, evidence-backed answers when customers, or their compliance and procurement teams, ask how sensitive mission data is protected. For AWS Partners in aerospace, defense-adjacent, or other regulated verticals, this is often where the FTR delivers the most immediate value: it turns “we take security seriously” into a documented, reviewable posture.
• A partnership that accelerates go-to-market –Achieving “Validated” status and working toward AWS Marketplace listing gives 360™ a recognizable point of trust when engaging new customers, particularly research institutions, agencies, and commercial operators who might not have the bandwidth to conduct their own deep technical vetting of a growing SaaS vendor. The “Reviewed by AWS” badge, AWS Marketplace presence, and access to AWS ISV Accelerate co-sell and ACE let procurement conversations start from a stronger baseline and simplify purchasing through existing AWS accounts. This matters for a startup competing for mission-critical infrastructure decisions against larger, more established players.
• Lasting engineering practice –The FTR gave IENAI SPACE’s DevOps and engineering teams a shared, concrete checklist to build around. The habits formed during the review (continuous SBOM scanning, tenant-scoped IAM by default, and defined backup RPOs) are now part of how new 360™ features ship, not a one-time compliance exercise. For AWS Partners considering their own FTR, this is worth planning for explicitly: the review works best as a forcing function for lasting engineering practice, not simply a certification to pass.

Conclusion

In this post, we explained how AWS Partner IENAI SPACE brings integrated, cloud-based mission design to space teams with 360™, and how AWS supports that offering on three fronts: scalable, secure infrastructure for compute-intensive simulations; managed services such as Amazon EKS, AWS KMS, IAM, and Amazon S3 that underpin tenant isolation and data protection; and a partnership that, through the FTR, opens the path to AWS Marketplace and AWS ISV Accelerate.

By undergoing a Foundational Technical Review, AWS Partners, including deep-tech startups in emerging sectors like space mobility, can gain valuable technical and business benefits by addressing important requirements and managing ongoing compliance.

After you have registered as an AWS Partner through AWS Partner Central, you can request an FTR by joining the Software Path and following the steps in the FTR guide (login required). For more information, reach out to your Partner Development team contact.

IENAI SPACE – AWS Partner Spotlight

IENAI SPACE builds space mobility products and services for the next generation of small satellites. Its flagship SaaS product, 360™, runs on AWS and brings mission and space mobility analysis into a single cloud-based platform, available as the no-code 360™ Studio and the Python-based 360™ Library, with high-fidelity simulation and optimization that empower a sustainable new space economy.