Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

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 […]

February 23, 2023: We updated the link to the whitepaper in the first paragraph. Today, AWS released the Security Perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). The AWS CAF provides a framework to help you structure and plan your cloud adoption journey, and build a comprehensive approach to cloud computing throughout the IT […]

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 […]

Identity federation enables your enterprise users (such as Active Directory users) to access the AWS Management Console via single sign-on (SSO) by using their existing credentials. In Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, RelayState is an optional parameter that identifies a specified destination URL your users will access after signing in with SSO. When using […]

August 4, 2023: This blog post is out of date, and is in the process of being updated. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) allows you to use keys under your control to encrypt data at rest stored in Amazon S3. The two primary methods for implementing this encryption are server-side encryption (SSE) and client-side […]

July 19, 2021: We’ve updated this post to clarify PHI encryption requirements for Amazon CloudWatch Logs. In a previous blog post, Frequently Asked Questions About HIPAA Compliance in the AWS Cloud, I looked at some of the broad questions you have asked us about running protected health information (PHI) in the AWS cloud. In this […]

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. With the recent release of Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), you now can build applications without setting up and maintaining your own search cluster on Amazon EC2. One of the key benefits of using Amazon ES is that you can […]

Note from July 3, 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.   You can use AWS WAF (a web application firewall) to help protect your web applications from exploits that originate from groups of IP addresses that are known […]

March 10, 2020: This blog post is out of date. Please refer to this post for updated info: How to set up federated single sign-on to AWS using Google Workspace The AWS Security Blog has covered a variety of solutions for federating single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console. For example, How to Connect […]

Today, we continue a series of AWS cloud compliance FAQs by focusing on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and protected health information (PHI). AWS’s Healthcare and Life Science customers are doing important things for their customers in the AWS cloud, and we are excited to work with our partners to help tackle […]