In a fast-paced cloud environment governance is fundamental, defining standard policies for deployment and shifting left controls are key to successful organisations. Thanks to AWS Landing Zone and AWS Guardrails organisations can confidently deploy, control, and audit their resources and developments.
Let’s start by discussing what a Landing Zone is: AWS Landing Zone is a solution for setting up a secure, scalable, multi-account AWS environment. It’s designed to help organisations quickly deploy workloads and applications with confidence, governance and security.
Therefore implementing AWS Landing Zone is vital for organisations with a growing number of accounts, to allow each team to focus on their work while keeping deployments compliant with the organisation’s policies and requirements.
One of the cool security and compliance features of AWS Landing Zone is AWS Guardrails.
AWS Guardrails are a set of policies and best practices designed to guide and control the usage of AWS resources. They help organisations maintain a secure, compliant, and well-managed AWS environment. Specifically, AWS Guardrails:
- Define governance rules for security, operations, and compliance that can be applied across your AWS organisation or to specific groups of AWS accounts.
- Protect users from making choices that aren’t aligned with your overall organisation’s policies or requirements.
Guardrails can be preventive or detective:
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Preventive guardrails establish intent and prevent deployment of resources that don’t conform to your policies. For example, they might require AWS CloudTrail to be enabled in all accounts, or they might require your EC2 to be private.
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Detective guardrails continuously monitor deployed resources for non-conformance; they can generate alerts when non-compliant resources are detected, allowing automated response and remediation.
There are many advantages to using AWS Guardrails
- Ensuring Compliance and Security: by setting up guardrails, you can automate the enforcement of your organisation’s standards, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring consistent application across your entire cloud infrastructure.
- Automating Best Practices and Policies: AWS Guardrails can automate the enforcement of best practices and policies, making it easier to manage complex environments. This enforcement helps in maintaining a high level of governance without requiring constant manual oversight.
- Streamlining Audit Preparation: AWS Guardrails provide a clear trail of compliance and security measures taken, simplifying the audit process and making it easier to demonstrate adherence to required standards.
- Facilitating Proactive Risk Management: by proactively managing risks with guardrails, organisations can prevent potential issues before they arise. This proactive approach to risk management is essential in today’s fast-paced cloud environments, where new resources are constantly being deployed and changed.
- Enhancing Operational Efficiency: AWS Guardrails contribute to operational efficiency by standardising configurations and automating responses to events. This standardisation helps reduce the time and effort required to manage AWS resources, allowing teams to focus on more strategic tasks.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) compliance: implementing AWS Guardrails can ensure that your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is compliant with your organisation’s policies and standards.
- Cost optimization: implementing AWS Guardrails can help your organisation save money by offering standard and approved deployment configurations and avoiding over-provisioned resources.
What are the risks of not using AWS Guardrails?
Not using guardrails in cloud infrastructure can expose an organisation to a range of risks that can compromise security, compliance, and operational efficiency, including
- Increased Security Vulnerabilities: without guardrails, cloud environments are more susceptible to security breaches due to misconfigurations or non-compliant resource deployments. This can result in unauthorized access, data leaks, and other security incidents.
- Compliance Violations: organisations are required to adhere to various regulatory standards. Without guardrails, there’s a higher risk of non-compliance, which can lead to hefty fines, legal repercussions, and damage to reputation.
- Lack of Governance: AWS Guardrails provide a framework for governance. Without them, it becomes challenging to enforce policies and monitor the environment effectively, leading to governance gaps.
If your organisation is scaling its AWS usage and needs help in implementing AWS Guardrails, AWS Control Tower, AWS Landing Zones, and any other AWS Service, please feel free to reach out by visiting our contact page or sending an email to team@virtuability.com.