Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

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 […]

Data is a crucial part of every business and is used for strategic decision making at all levels of an organization. To extract value from their data more quickly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers are building automated data pipelines—from data ingestion to transformation and analytics. As part of this process, my customers often ask how […]

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 blog post, I show you how to improve the distributed denial of service (DDoS) resilience of your self-managed Domain Name System (DNS) service by using AWS Global Accelerator and AWS Shield Advanced. You can use those services to incorporate some of the techniques used by Amazon Route 53 to protect against DDoS attacks. […]

I’m pleased to announce the Amazon Web Services (AWS) AESCSF 2019 Workbook, a resource designed to help energy sector customers align with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)’s Australian Energy Sector Cyber Security Framework (AESCSF) 2019. The workbook helps energy sector customers to: Conduct due diligence on the AWS control environment, by mapping the AESCSF […]

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. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we encourage our customers to take advantage of encryption to […]

As you look to manage network security on Amazon Web Services (AWS), there are multiple tools you can use to protect your resources and keep your data safe. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), security groups (SGs), network access control lists (network ACLs), AWS WAF, and the recently launched AWS Network Firewall all offer points […]

December 4, 2020: We’ve updated this post to use s3:CreateBucket to simplify the intro example, replaced figure 8 removing the IfExists reference, and clarified qualifier information in the example. In this post, I’m going to share two techniques I’ve used to write least privilege AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. If you’re not familiar […]

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 […]

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Cloud Audit Academy AWS-specific (CAA AWS-specific). This is a new, accelerated training program for auditing AWS Cloud implementations, and is designed for auditors, regulators, or anyone working within a control framework. Over the past few years, auditing security in the cloud has become one of the fastest […]