Category: Management Tools

Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to react selectively to events in the cloud as well as in your applications. Specifically, you can create CloudWatch Events rules that match event patterns, and take actions in response to those patterns. CloudWatch Events lets you process both AWS-provided events and custom events (those that you create and inject […]

You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to grant access to resources in your AWS account, another AWS account you own, or a third-party account. For example, you may have an AWS account used for production resources and a separate AWS account for development resources. Throughout this post, I will refer to […]

Note from July 4, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository.   AWS WAF is a web application firewall that integrates closely with Amazon CloudFront (AWS’s content delivery network [CDN]). AWS WAF gives you control to allow or block […]

Update on October 24, 2018: Note that if you do not author the Lambda function correctly, this setup can create an infinite loop (in this case, a rule that is fired repeatedly, which can impact your AWS resources and cause higher than expected charges to your account). The example Lambda function I provide in Step […]

Starting today, you can use AWS CloudTrail to track the activity of your federated users (web identity federation and Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML]). For example, you can now use CloudTrail to identify a SAML federated user who terminated an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account, or to identify a mobile application user who […]

Back in September, I wrote about How to Help Lock Down a User’s Amazon EC2 Capabilities to a Single VPC. In that blog post, I highlighted what I have found to be an effective approach to the virtual private cloud (VPC) lockdown scenario. Since that time, I have worked on making the related information easier […]

Today, we’re happy to release the AWS Config Rules repository, a community-based source of custom AWS Config Rules. This new repository gives you a streamlined way to automate your assessment and compliance against best practices for security of AWS resources. AWS Config Rules is a service that provides automated, periodic security and compliance checking of […]

In my previous posts in this series, I explained how to get started with the DevSecOps environment for HIPAA that is depicted in the following architecture diagram. In my second post in this series, I gave you guidance about how to set up AWS Service Catalog (#4 in the following diagram) to allow developers a […]

In my previous post, I walked through the setup of a DevSecOps environment that gives healthcare developers the ability to launch their own healthcare web server. At the heart of the architecture is AWS CloudFormation, a JSON representation of your architecture that allows security administrators to provision AWS resources according to the compliance standards they […]

In my previous blog post, I discussed the idea of using the cloud to protect the cloud and improving healthcare IT by applying DevSecOps methods. In Part 2 today, I will show an architecture composed of AWS services that gives healthcare security administrators necessary controls, allows healthcare developers to interact with the system using familiar […]