Tag: AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA)

To drive innovation and optimise operations in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, UK public sector organizations need to transfer data quickly and safely, in accordance with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)’s guidance on how to configure, deploy, and use cloud services securely. The NCSC provides security guidance for protecting government systems, planning for cyber incidents, and more. In this post, we cover how you can configure AWS services—like AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway, and AWS Transfer Family—to align your data transfer solution with the NCSC’s cloud security principles, as understanding these configurations is important to protect data and meet requirements for local force accreditation.

The AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA) landing zone helps customers deploy and operate a secure multi-account, multi-Region AWS environment. Governments in Canada and others around the world currently use the ASEA, with over 30 deployments to date. Some of these same customers also use VMware Cloud on AWS to integrate on-premises vSphere environments, allowing them to move existing workloads to the cloud more quickly. Integrating your VMware workload with natively managed AWS services can help you reduce your operational overhead and optimize your total cost of ownership (TCO). In this blog post, we review the technical considerations related to integrating your ASEA landing zone with your VMware Cloud on the AWS environment.

Government departments work hard to meet required security framework controls for cloud services, and obtaining an Authority to Operate (ATO) can sometimes take up to 18 months. To assist with this process, AWS developed the open-source AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA), a tool designed to help deploy and operate secure multi-account AWS environments. This post describes how government departments can more simply deploy a web application consisting of a single-page application (SPA), backend API, and database within ASEA.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) added more AWS services to its assessment of the AWS Canada (Central) Region, bringing the total number of assessed AWS services to 120. This provides Canadian public sector customers additional confidence that AWS Cloud services meet the Government of Canada’s security control requirements. Using these services in conjunction with the deployment of the open source AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA) solution reduces cloud service configuration time from months to days.