AWS Security Blog

Automate analyzing your permissions using IAM access advisor APIs

As an administrator that grants access to AWS, you might want to enable your developers to get started with AWS quickly by granting them broad access. However, as your developers gain experience and your applications stabilize, you want to limit permissions to only what they need. To do this, access advisor will determine the permissions […]

Scaling a governance, risk, and compliance program for the cloud, emerging technologies, and innovation

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs are sometimes looked upon as the bureaucracy getting in the way of exciting cybersecurity work. But a good GRC program establishes the foundation for meeting security and compliance objectives. It is the proactive approach to […]

How to automate replication of secrets in AWS Secrets Manager across AWS Regions

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. March 4, 2021: AWS Secrets Manager has launched a new feature to help you easily […]

Fall 2018 SOC reports now available with 73 services in scope

Seventy-three. That’s the number of AWS services now available to our customers under our System and Organizational Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3 audits, with 11 additional services included during this most recent audit cycle. The SOC reports are now available to you on demand in the AWS Management Console. The SOC 3 report can […]

Figure 1 - The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework Security Perspective

How to manage security governance using DevOps methodologies

I’ve conducted more security audits and reviews than I can comfortably count, and I’ve found that these reviews can be surprisingly open to interpretation (as much as they try not to be). Many companies use spreadsheets to explain and limit business risks, with an annual review to confirm the continued suitability of their controls. However, […]

Simplify granting access to your AWS resources by using tags on AWS IAM users and roles

Recently, AWS enabled tags on IAM principals (users and roles). The main benefit of this new feature is that you’ll be able to author a single policy to grant access to individual resources and you’ll no longer need to update your policies for each new resource that you add. In other words, you can now […]

Use AWS Secrets Manager client-side caching libraries to improve the availability and latency of using your secrets

At AWS, we offer features that make it easier for you to follow the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practice of using short-term credentials. For example, you can use an IAM role that rotates and distributes short-term AWS credentials to your applications automatically. Similarly, you can configure AWS Secrets Manager to rotate a […]