Achieve AWS Security Governance
at Scale with Cost Optimization
What is AWS Security Governance at Scale?
As enterprises speed up adoption of AWS Cloud, the need to balance agility with security governance is a top priority for all CIO, CISO and Director IT roles across small and large businesses. AWS offers a 1-Click model to provision assets across business units, global regions and product teams but one needs to carefully consider factors around Identity & Access management, Security & Compliance, Budget & Cost management. Without properly implemented governance & controls, enterprises stand exposed to the risk of assets, data and critical information being exposed which can be catastrophic for the business.
To help every enterprise gain from global best practices, AWS offers a comprehensive set of control services such as AWS Control Tower, AWS Security Hub, AWS Budget & Cost management. A proper implementation of these best practices can help enterprises achieve AWS Security Governance at Scale aligned with AWS well architected frameworks and also compliant to industry standards such as CIS, NIST, etc.
Relevance Lab in partnership with AWS has been working closely to make cloud adoption frictionless, automated and cost effective. By bringing together a unique combination of consulting approach, deep expertise, complementary tools for automation and pre-built solutions, we can help enterprises achieve security and governance maturity for their AWS cloud operating environment.
Why should enterprises focus on this?
To achieve agility, compliance and security, enterprises cannot rely on manual processes and hence automation plays a key role. It calls for an integrated framework referred to as “Security Governance at Scale” which focuses on Account Management, Security, Compliance Automation, Budget and Cost Management. This model helps clients to fast track their business objectives, while ensuring their workloads and cloud environments meet security and compliance requirements. Key benefits that organizations can expect are listed below.
-
Transition from a “reactive” to a “proactive” approach
-
Achieve higher levels along a maturity model curve with incremental benefits
-
Reduce internal IT and Security team efforts by 30-50% with prebuilt solution and automation
-
Faster detection & resolution of issues by 50%
-
Cost savings of up-to 60% (typically $100-500K on annual spends) covering human and asset costs
How to get started?
An AWS Security Governance at Scale implementation requires streamlining account management across multiple AWS accounts & workloads through centralization, standardization, and automation. The following aspects contribute to this objective.
- Policy automation to apply standard specifications to AWS IAM users, groups, and roles
- Identity federation using AWS Single Sign-On integrated with external identity providers, such as OpenID or Active Directory. AWS CloudTrail helps track user activities across multiple AWS accounts
- Account automation using predefined deployment templates to create accounts for an organization
- Identity and access automation services such as SSO, OpenID, and Active Directory can be used to automatically grant access to resources based on defined roles rather than to individual accounts
- Security automation using security templates that align with a company’s security and compliance requirements
- Policy enforcement at organization or resource level encompassing AWS Regions, AWS services, and specific resource configurations
- Budget planning & enforcement to provide ability to allocate budgets to different entities such as projects, teams, departments, business units, etc, the ability to monitor and automatically trigger enforcement actions when limits are exceeded and financial dashboards offering real-time visibility to decision makers
Account Management
Policy Automation Identity Federation Account Automation
Security & Compliance
Identity & Access Automation Security Automation Policy Enforcement
Budget & Cost Management
Budget Planning Budget Enforcement Cost Explorer
Deployment Architecture
An AWS multi-account environment anchored by AWS Control Tower is a best practice architecture pattern for organizations consisting of multiple projects teams, departments, BUs, etc. An organization’s main account serves as the root or starting point which can be used to provision accounts using Account Factory, to implement centralized billing, to manage SSO, and to manage guard rails. The Core OU (created by AWS Control Tower) contains accounts for log archive and auditing. The log archive account is a repository for API activity logs and resource configurations from all other accounts. The audit account is a restricted account which provides security and compliance teams with read and write access to all other accounts. Clients can create different custom organizational units (OUs) based on their structural needs.
Relevance Lab's 10-10 Program to accelerate your journey
To help clients begin and accelerate their journey towards achieving a highly mature AWS Security Governance at Scale implementation for their multi-account AWS cloud operating environment. Relevance Lab has launched an accelerator program named as 10-10 Program for AWS Security Governance at Scale. This is in keeping with our motto of helping our clients to adopt and use AWS Cloud “The Right Way”.
Summary
Clients are often faced with a situation where their AWS environments have started and grown without an underlying starting well-architected framework. Account proliferation without standardization poses significant security risks and high costs. They also many times rely on traditional IT management processes which are manual and not scalable. In some cases, clients rely on third party tools or solutions without due consideration, which can further complicate and increase operational challenges.
With AWS control services, clients can improve security and governance of their AWS environments and fast track their business objectives. Relevance Lab can help organizations to build or migrate existing accounts to a secured, compliant, multi account AWS environment enabled with automation to increase both operational and cost efficiency. This transition can be made frictionless using our specialized competencies, RLCatalyst automation framework and the Governance at Scale handbook. Our 10-10 Program has been designed for easy consumption for our clients and with the motto to accelerate our clients’ journey towards AWS Security Governance at Scale.
To learn more security governance at scale, refer to the following additional content.
To contact us with your requirements or leverage our 10-10 program for AWS Security Governance at Scale, please provide your details in the form below.