Category: Intermediate (200)

September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. When you connect an external identity provider (IdP) to AWS IAM Identity Center using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 standard, you must create […]

As organizations scale up their Amazon Web Services (AWS) presence, they are faced with the challenge of administering user identities and controlling access across multiple accounts and Regions. As this presence grows, managing user access to cloud resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) becomes increasingly complex. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active […]

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) provides fine-grained access control, powered by the Open Distro for Elasticsearch security plugin. The security plugin adds Kibana authentication and access control at the cluster, index, document, and field levels that can help you secure […]

In this post, we explain the United Kingdom (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)’s guidance on VPN profiles configuration, and how the configuration parameters for the AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN) align with the NCSC guidance. At the end of the post, there are links to code to deploy the AWS VPN in line […]

In this blog post I show you how to deploy the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solution for Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation. The first installment of this series was about how to create playbooks using Amazon CloudWatch Events, AWS Lambda functions, and AWS Security Hub custom actions that you can run manually based on […]

When you build applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s a common security practice to isolate production resources from non-production resources by logically grouping them into functional units or organizational units. There are many benefits to this approach, such as making it easier to implement the principal of least privilege, or reducing the scope of […]

In response to the current shift towards a remote workforce, companies are providing greater access to corporate applications from a range of different devices. Amazon WorkSpaces is a desktop-as-a-service solution that can be used to quickly deploy cloud-based desktops to your external users, including employees, third-party vendors, and consultants. Amazon WorkSpaces desktops are accessible from […]

An incident response plan (also known as procedure) contains the detailed actions an organization takes to prepare for a security incident in its IT environment. It also includes the mechanisms to detect, analyze, contain, eradicate, and recover from a security incident. Every incident response plan should contain a section on recovery, which outlines scenarios ranging […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer generates comprehensive findings to help you identify resources that grant public and cross-account access. Now, you can also apply archive rules to existing findings, so you can better manage findings and focus on the findings that need your attention most. You can think of archive rules as […]

Whether your web applications provide static or dynamic content, you can improve their performance, availability, and security by using Amazon CloudFront as your content delivery network (CDN). CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your web content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. CloudFront ensures that end-user requests […]