Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

One of the main tenets of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the protection of student education records, including personally identifiable information (PII) and directory information. We recently updated our FERPA Compliance on AWS whitepaper to include AWS service-specific guidance for 24 AWS services. The whitepaper describes how these services can be […]

Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the internet. Before issuing a certificate for your website, Amazon must validate that you control the domain name for your site. You can now use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Domain Name System (DNS) validation to […]

Starting today, AWS Shield Advanced can help protect your Amazon EC2 instances and Network Load Balancers against infrastructure-layer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Enable AWS Shield Advanced on an AWS Elastic IP address and attach the address to an internet-facing EC2 instance or Network Load Balancer. AWS Shield Advanced automatically detects the type of AWS resource behind the […]

Most malware tries to compromise your systems by using a known vulnerability that the maker of the operating system has already patched. To help prevent malware from affecting your systems, two security best practices are to apply all operating system patches to your systems and actively monitor your systems for missing patches. In case you […]

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info You can now encrypt and decrypt your data at the command line and in scripts—no […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has made it easier for you to create and modify your IAM policies by using a point-and-click visual editor in the IAM console. The new visual editor guides you through granting permissions using IAM policies without requiring you to write the policy in JSON (although you can still author and edit policies in JSON, if you prefer). This update to the IAM console makes it easier to grant least privilege permissions for the AWS service actions you select by listing all the supported resource types and request conditions you can specify. And, as with policy summaries, the visual editor also identifies and helps you correct unrecognized services and actions and permissions errors when you import existing policies. In this blog post, I give a brief overview of policy concepts and show you how to create a new policy by using the visual editor.

Newly updated reports are available for AWS System and Organization Control Report 1 (SOC 1), formerly called AWS Service Organization Control Report 1, and AWS SOC 2: Security, Availability, & Confidentiality Report. You can download both reports for free and on demand in the AWS Management Console through AWS Artifact. The updated AWS SOC 3: […]

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is now a HIPAA Eligible Service and has been added to the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA). This means you can use ElastiCache for Redis to help you power healthcare applications as well as process, maintain, and store protected health information (PHI). ElastiCache for Redis is a Redis-compatible, fully-managed, in-memory data […]

Today, AWS introduced AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Standard Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition), which is managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) that is performance optimized for small and midsize businesses. AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) offers you a highly available and cost-effective primary directory in the AWS Cloud that […]

September 16, 2025: AWS Private CA Connector for Active Directory now supports server-side LDAPS certificate enrollment for AWS Managed Microsoft AD domain controllers. To learn how to enable server-side LDAPS for your AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory using AWS Private CA Connector for Active Directory, please refer to our updated documentation. March 18, 2024: We […]