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Guidance for Trusted Secure Enclaves on AWS

Protect and isolate your highly sensitive workloads with a secure enclave

Overview

This Guidance shows how you can build a comprehensive cloud architecture for sensitive workloads in national security, defense, and national law enforcement. By using a multi-account architecture on AWS, you can deliver your missions while keeping sensitive data and workloads secure. This Guidance is designed to help you meet strict and unique security and compliance requirements, addressing central identity and access management, governance, data security, comprehensive logging, and network design and segmentation in alignment with various US security frameworks.

How it works

Overview

This architecture diagram shows how to configure comprehensive, multi-account workloads with unique security and compliance requirements.

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating AWS Trusted Secure Enclaves, showing the organization management account, security accounts, infrastructure accounts, sensitive application OUs, and network connections to a corporate data center and the internet.

Organization Management Account

This architecture diagram shows how an organization can group multiple accounts, all controlled by a single customer entity. Follow the steps in this architecture diagram to deploy the Organization Management Account part of this Guidance.

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating AWS Trusted Secure Enclaves organization management. The diagram shows organizational units (Security OU, Infrastructure OU, Dev OU, Prod OU, Central OU, Test OU), AWS KMS, SCPs, and integration with a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AD Connector, AWS IAM Identity Center, and corporate users.

Security Accounts

This architecture diagram shows how to centrally configure a comprehensive log collection  across AWS services and accounts. Follow the steps in this architecture diagram to deploy the Security Accounts part of this Guidance.

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating AWS trusted and secure enclave organization security, showing management and security accounts, log archive (Amazon S3, CloudWatch, CloudTrail), and security tooling such as GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, Firewall Manager, Macie, IAM Access Analyzer, and Alarm.

Infrastructure Accounts

This architecture diagram shows how a centralized, isolated networking environment is built with Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Follow the steps in this architecture diagram to deploy the Infrastructure Accounts part of this Guidance.

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Architecture diagram showing an AWS infrastructure design for trusted secure enclaves. The diagram illustrates the organization management account, infrastructure accounts for operations and DevOps, shared network components, perimeter security including AWS Network Firewall, ELB, AWS WAF, NAT gateway, and integration with corporate data centers via AWS Direct Connect. The layout demonstrates central VPCs, CI/CD tooling, firewalls, and connectivity to the internet.

Application, Community, Team, or Group Accounts (Sensitive)

This architecture diagram shows how to configure segmentation and separation between workloads belonging to different stages of the software development lifecycle, or between different IT administrative roles. Follow the steps in this architecture diagram to deploy the Application, Community, Team, or Group Accounts part of this Guidance. 

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram showing the AWS Trusted Secure Enclaves setup for sensitive accounts, including organization management accounts, organizational units, and teams (Dev, Test, Prod, Shared) using VPCs, AWS Nitro System hosts, ELB, and AWS WAF.

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

This Guidance uses Organizations with AWS CloudFormation stacks and configurations to create a secure foundation for your AWS environment. This provides an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solution that accelerates your implementation of technical security controls. Config rules remediate any configuration deltas that have been determined to negatively impact the prescribed architecture. You can use the AWS global commercial infrastructure for sensitive classified workloads and automate secure systems to deliver missions faster while continually improving your processes and procedures.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper

This Guidance uses Organizations to facilitate the deployment of organizational guardrails, such as API logging with CloudTrail. This Guidance also provides preventative controls using prescriptive AWS SCPs as a guardrail mechanism, principally used to deny specific or entire categories of APIs within your environment (to make sure that workloads are deployed only in prescribed Regions) or deny access to specific AWS services. CloudTrail and CloudWatch logs support a prescribed comprehensive log collection and centralization across AWS services and accounts. AWS security capabilities and the multitude of security-relevant services are configured in a defined pattern that helps you meet some of the strictest security requirements in the world.

Read the Security whitepaper

This Guidance uses multiple Availability Zones (AZs), so the loss of one AZ does not impact application availability. You can use CloudFormation to automate the provisioning and updating of your infrastructure in a safe and controlled manner. This Guidance also provides prebuilt rules for evaluating AWS resource configurations and configuration changes within your environment, or you can create custom rules in AWS Lambda to define best practices and guidelines. You can automate the ability to scale your environment to meet demand and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.

Read the Reliability whitepaper

This Guidance simplifies cloud infrastructure management by using Transit Gateway, which serves as a central hub that connects multiple VPCs through a single gateway, making it easier to scale and maintain the network architecture. This simplifies your network architecture and facilitates efficient traffic routing between different AWS accounts within your organization.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper

This Guidance provides the ability to avoid or remove unneeded costs or the use of suboptimal resources. Organizations provides centralization and consolidated billing, facilitating the strong separation of resource use and cost optimization. This Guidance prescribes moving AWS public API endpoints into your private VPC address space, using centralized endpoints for cost efficiency. Additionally, you can use AWS Cost and Usage Reports(AWS CUR) to track your AWS usage and estimate charges.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper

This Guidance helps you reduce the carbon footprint associated with managing workloads within your own datacenters. The AWS global infrastructure offers supporting infrastructure (such as power, cooling, and networking), a higher utilization rate, and faster technology refreshes than traditional data centers. Additionally, the segmentation and separation of workloads helps you reduce unnecessary data movement, and Amazon S3 offers storage tiers and the ability to automatically move data to efficient storage tiers.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.