Category: Best Practices

For decades, we’ve watched energy companies attempt to bring off-the-shelf information technology (IT) systems into operations technology (OT) environments. These attempts have had varying degrees of success. While converging OT and IT brings new efficiencies, it also brings new risks. There are many moving parts to convergence, and there are several questions that you must […]

With Amazon Cognito, you can implement customer identity and access management (CIAM) into your web and mobile applications. You can add user authentication and access control to your applications in minutes. In this post, I introduce you to the new access token customization feature for Amazon Cognito user pools and show you how to use […]

In this blog post, we delve into using Amazon Web Services (AWS) data protection services such as AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to help fortify both the security of the pipeline and security in the pipeline. We explore how these services contribute to the overall security […]

AWS Signer is a fully managed code-signing service to help ensure the trust and integrity of your code. It helps you verify that the code comes from a trusted source and that an unauthorized party has not accessed it. AWS Signer manages code signing certificates and public and private keys, which can reduce the overhead […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are at the core of access control on AWS. They enable the bundling of permissions, helping to provide effective and modular access control for AWS services. Service control policies (SCPs) complement IAM policies by helping organizations enforce permission guardrails at scale across their AWS accounts. The use of access control […]

As organizations expand their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment and migrate workloads to the cloud, they find themselves dealing with many AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies. These roles and policies multiply because IAM fills a crucial role in securing and controlling access to AWS resources. Imagine you have a team creating […]

In this post, I will show you how to apply security at multiple layers of a web application hosted on AWS. Apply security at all layers is a design principle of the Security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It encourages you to apply security at the network edge, virtual private cloud (VPC), load balancer, […]

Welcome to the fifth post in the Establishing a data perimeter on AWS series. Throughout this series, we’ve discussed how a set of preventative guardrails can create an always-on boundary to help ensure that your trusted identities are accessing your trusted resources over expected networks. In a previous post, we emphasized the importance of preventing […]

February 7, 2024: This post has been updated to reflect the the CloudFormation changes for AWS Cloud9 instances requiring an ImageId for deployment as of December 4th 2023. Refer to the AWS Cloud9 documentation for further details. Early-feedback loops exist to provide developers with ongoing feedback through automated checks. This enables developers to take early […]

Sometimes you want to configure an AWS service to access your resource in another service. For example, you can configure AWS CloudTrail, a service that monitors account activity across your AWS infrastructure, to write log data to your bucket in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When you do this, you want assurance that the service […]