July 24, 2020: The number 9 item in this list, the Auditing Security Checklist, has been replaced by a Cloud Audit Academy course. The following list includes the ten most downloaded AWS security and compliance documents in 2017. Using this list, you can learn about what other AWS customers found most interesting about security and […]

May 23, 2022: This blog post is out of date. Please refer here for current info: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configure-sso.html September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. Today, AWS made it easier to use […]

Define permissions on a resource in order to grant IAM users access to resources in other AWS accounts.

January 20, 2020: Based on customer feedback, we rephrased the fourth goal in the “An example structure with nested OUs and SCPs” section to try to improve clarity. With AWS Organizations, you can centrally manage policies across multiple AWS accounts without having to use custom scripts and manual processes. For example, you can apply service […]

As I have discussed in the past, sophisticated AWS customers invariably control multiple AWS accounts. Some of these are the results of acquisitions or a holdover from bottom-up, departmental adoption of cloud computing. Others create multiple accounts in order to isolate developers, projects, or departments from each other. We strongly endorse this as a best […]

AWS Config enables continuous monitoring of your AWS resources, making it simple to assess, audit, and record resource configurations and changes. AWS Config does this through the use of rules that define the desired configuration state of your AWS resources. AWS Config provides a number of AWS managed rules that address a wide range of […]

As a security best practice, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recommends that you use temporary security credentials from AWS Security Token Service (STS) when you access your AWS resources. Temporary credentials are short-term credentials generated dynamically and provided to the user upon request. Today, one of the most widely used mechanisms for requesting temporary […]

Feb 17, 2025: This blog post references AWS CloudHSM Client SDK 3, which is no longer the recommended version. AWS recommends that you use the latest version, AWS CloudHSM Client SDK 5, which provides updated functionality and commands. We are currently working on an updated blog post for CloudHSM Client SDK 5. See the AWS […]

Follow these best practices for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help secure your AWS account and resources.

AWS has released a new whitepaper that has been requested by many AWS customers: AWS Policy Perspectives: Data Residency. Data residency is the requirement that all customer content processed and stored in an IT system must remain within a specific country’s borders, and it is one of the foremost concerns of governments that want to […]

Use roles to grant an IAM user access through identity federation (authorization by an external service).

In this post, we'll demonstrate querying the Amazon Redshift audit data logged in S3 to provide answers to common use cases described preceding.

The following 20 pages were the most viewed AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) documentation pages in 2017. I have included a brief description with each link to explain what each page covers. Use this list to see what other AWS customers have been viewing and perhaps to pique your own interest in a topic you’ve […]

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Introduced at AWS re:Invent 2017, Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help you protect your AWS accounts and workloads. In an AWS Blog post, Jeff Barr shows you how to […]

Note from June 5, 2019: The approach and architecture in this post is recommended if you prefer more control over DNS servers or prefer to use AWS Managed Active Directory for DNS resolution, however there are some limitations to this approach and we added a “Limitations and additional considerations” section to this post to describe […]

June 15, 2020: This blog is out of date. Please refer here for the updated info: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-enhanced-amazon-macie-now-available/ Amazon Macie is a security service that makes it easy for you to discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Macie collects AWS CloudTrail events and Amazon S3 metadata such as permissions […]

September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. Today, AWS introduced AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS IAM Identity Center), a service that makes it easy for you to centrally manage IAM Identity […]