Scheduled assessments – Security Compliance with AWS Config, AWS Security Hub, and Automated Remediation
Scheduled assessments
Scheduled assessments are periodic evaluations of resources against compliance rules. Unlike real-time monitoring, these assessments occur at predefined intervals—for instance, daily, weekly, or monthly—depending on the organization’s needs and the nature of the resources. These assessments provide a regular, systematic review of the compliance posture. They are particularly useful for less dynamic environments or for compliance checks that do not require immediate action upon deviation.
For example, a weekly scheduled assessment might be used to verify that all IAM users have MFA enabled, ensuring ongoing adherence to security best practices.
Config dashboards
Config provides dashboards that offer a visual representation of the compliance status of AWS resources. These dashboards aggregate and display compliance data in an easily interpretable format, providing a bird’s-eye view of an organization’s AWS environment. For instance, a dashboard could display the compliance status of all EC2 instances with specific security configurations, such as those requiring certain types of encryption or network settings. By customizing these dashboards, organizations can focus on key metrics and trends that are most relevant to their compliance requirements, enabling efficient tracking and management of their AWS resource compliance.
Compliance reporting
Config facilitates compliance reporting and audit preparation by providing detailed reports of configuration changes and compliance history. Key reports include configuration history, showcasing changes over time, compliance reports from Config rules, and relationship mapping for understanding resource connections. Configuration drift analysis is available to detect deviations from expected setups. Additionally, Config allows exporting this wealth of data to S3, supporting long-term retention and external analysis. These comprehensive reports are vital for demonstrating adherence to both internal and regulatory standards, providing essential evidence during audits, and facilitating thorough change management and security analysis.
Compliance trend analysis
Compliance trend analysis focuses on evaluating historical compliance data to uncover evolving patterns or recurring issues. For example, an organization might want to analyze the trend of unauthorized security group changes over several months. By observing the frequency and nature of these changes, they can identify specific areas where security policies might be frequently misunderstood or bypassed. This practical approach to trend analysis not only aids in pinpointing systemic issues but also helps in evaluating the effectiveness of current compliance measures and in formulating strategies for enhancing overall compliance in the future.
These analyses can be performed using the advanced query functionality within Config. It offers an SQL-based interface for retrieving AWS resource configuration metadata and assessing resource compliance across single or multi-account setups. A more recently introduced feature is the generative AI-powered natural language querying feature, enabling users to interrogate AWS resources, configurations, or compliance status using simple commands or questions in everyday language. This innovation minimizes the necessity for SQL proficiency or a deep understanding of resource configurations, simplifying the query process significantly.
Alternatively, organizations can combine Config data with other operational datasets using Amazon Athena to gain more comprehensive insights. For example, by combining Config data on security group changes with VPC flow logs, an organization can analyze the correlation between security group modifications and network traffic patterns. This combined analysis can reveal whether certain security group changes lead to unexpected network traffic spikes or breaches, providing valuable insights for enhancing security measures and compliance strategies.