As your enterprise scales in the cloud, compliance simply isn’t an option. It’s mission-critical. You could be dealing with patient data under HIPAA or processing a credit transaction under PCI DSS.
In any event, failing to meet cloud compliance standards could amount to regulatory penalties and security incidents. Even worse, it might result in you losing the trust of your most valued asset: your customers.
The primary issue with scaling in the cloud environment lies in the reality that AWS provides a secure and compliant foundation, but you’re responsible for the correct configuration. Far too many companies today still operate under the impression that Amazon Web Services (AWS) does the security compliance configuration for them. This misconception has teams stumbling and bumbling, especially those without deep DevSecOps expertise.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into AWS cloud compliance. You’ll get a close look at:
- The shared responsibility model
- Common challenges faced by developers
- Best solutions for making AWS cloud compliance seamless
Key Takeaways
- AWS offers compliance-ready infrastructure, but you’ll have to configure and maintain compliance yourself.
- AWS offers helpful resources like AWS Artifact, CloudTrail, and Config to support your auditing and monitoring.
- DuploCloud embeds compliance best practices into infrastructure-as-code so developers can build secure environments without the complexity that comes with doing it all manually.
Understanding AWS Cloud Compliance
When we talk about AWS compliance, we’re referring to how cloud workloads align with regulatory frameworks like:
- HIPAA
- SOC 2
- PCI DSS
- And more
These regulations are the rules for how data is stored, accessed, and protected in the cloud.
Now, as a cloud computing platform, AWS does comply with industry frameworks. At the same time, the platform is not responsible for what you develop there. In essence, users can trust that the framework is compliant, but anything you create, you must ensure is compliant as well. This includes your:
- Configurations
- Data handling policies
- Auditing procedures
In short, your security hub must line up with the AWS security hub so that your AWS security meets each compliance standard necessary.
AWS Compliance Programs Overview
AWS maintains an extensive portfolio of compliance certifications. When building compliant workloads on AWS, users need to realize that compliance isn’t one-size-fits-all. You’ll need to adjust and adapt your compliance based on global and industry-specific frameworks. Global refers to a larger region of coverage, either a country or, as the name implies, the entire globe.
Here’s a glance at what this means:
- HIPAA: U.S. healthcare data privacy - industry specific
- SOC 2: Trust Services Criteria - global
- PCI DSS: Payment data protection - industry specific
- ISO 27001: Information security management - global
- FedRAMP: U.S. government cloud compliance - global
- GDPR/CCPA: Data privacy for EU and California residents - global
When you understand the frameworks that are relevant to your operations, you can make sure that your AWS workloads are compliant. This will hold true at a technical level and in terms of legal and regulatory expectations.
AWS also offers AWS Artifact. This is a self-service portal that allows customers to access security and compliance documents. These can include audit reports and certifications.
Note: These AWS programs are building blocks for your development. Your team must implement its own controls on top of those building blocks to ensure your product is compliant in its specific environments.
The AWS Shared Responsibility Model
The most fundamental aspect of creating when it comes to compliance in AWS is the Shared Responsibility Model.
AWS will secure the infrastructure of the cloud, including:
- Servers
- Storage
- Networking
- Data centers
At the same time, customers must take responsibility for everything they build in the cloud.
This includes:
- Correctly configuring Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles
- Encrypting sensitive data
- Enabling logging and monitoring
- Implementing compliance-friendly development and deployment workflows
When companies ignore this mode, they often find themselves with cloud misconfigurations and compliance gaps.
Cloud Compliance Challenges on AWS
Now, just because you understand the model, honor it, and hope to follow it, doesn’t mean you won’t face issues. Many companies come up against cloud compliance challenges when developing on AWS. Here are the most pressing among them and the solutions to move forward:
Manual Configuration and Human Error
Anyone who’s been in AWS knows that the number of settings in this platform is overwhelming. Even the most seasoned DevOps teams struggle. And when you’ve got to manually set IAM permissions, encryption policies, and audit logging, you’re setting yourself up for mistakes.
Solution: Apply secure defaults automatically with tools like DuploCloud. You’ll be able to automate infrastructure and provisioning, and completely eliminate human error.
Misconfigured IAM Roles and Policies
When developers make IAM missteps, they open the door to privilege escalation and data breaches. And it’s not like these missteps are easily avoidable. In fact, it’s super easy to over-permission roles or forget to rotate keys.
Solution: You can automate IAM setups with platforms like DuploCloud, where you can apply least-privilege principles. This helps you reduce any manual exposure you may be subject to.
Lack of Continuous Auditing and Alerting
If you don’t have compliance monitoring in real time, you may end up dealing with violations that go unnoticed for days… or weeks.
Solution: Make sure you enable AWS CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and Config Rules. This extra layer of security will track any changes and detect any violations on a continuous basis.
Maintaining Compliance as Infrastructure Scales
When your app is small, it might perform just fine, but as your system grows, your security needs grow as well. Scaling, especially quickly, can break your security assumptions.
Solution: You should always use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to enforce a standardized, compliant infrastructure. That way, as your teams grow and your deployments multiply, security will scale with you.
DevOps vs. Security Friction
Unfortunately, security requirements can slow down the development process. It’s a primary complaint of developers. At the same time, security teams struggle to keep pace with rapid product releases. This conflict can present friction.
Solution: Leverage a tool that will embed security and compliance into your DevOps workflows, like DuploCloud. That way, you won’t have to require compliance expertise from your developers.
Key Compliance Standards on AWS
AWS supports a range of compliance standards to help your company meet industry requirements and regulations. But, of course, each framework comes with its own set of technical and procedural expectations. And each one needs different documentation. Below, we break down for you some of the most common compliance standards.
This includes what they cover, how AWS supports them, and what you’re responsible for.
HIPAA
If you handle Protected Health Information (PHI), AWS offers a Business Associate Addendum (BAA), but you still need to:
- Encrypt PHI using AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
- Maintain audit trails via CloudTrail
- Restrict access using fine-grained IAM policies
SOC 2
SOC 2 focuses on five Trust Service Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. You’ll need to:
- Store logs securely with Amazon S3 and CloudTrail
- Set uptime monitoring and incident response with CloudWatch
- Enforce access control and authentication policies
PCI DSS
For organizations that process credit card data, you’ve got to:
- Use tokenization to avoid storing card data directly
- Segment networks using security groups and VPCs
- Implement logging and file integrity checks using AWS-native tools
FedRAMP
For federal workloads, FedRAMP compliance is a must. You’ll need to:
- Leverage AWS GovCloud for processing and storing federal data
- Only use FedRAMP-authorized AWS services
- Build and maintain system security plans and continuous monitoring reports
GDPR & CCPA
Data privacy laws demand:
- Clear data processing agreements
- Transparent breach notification policies
- Control over data residency and user access requests
Best Practices for AWS Cloud Compliance
It’s not easy to figure out how to navigate cloud compliance on AWS. But with the right technical tools and organizational practices, you can get ready for any audit and minimize your security risks. Here, you’ll find the best practices to keep your AWS environment secure and compliant.
1. Use AWS Config for Continuous Compliance Checks
What it solves: Compliance has to be ongoing. Without ongoing configuration monitoring, resources that aren’t in compliance can go unnoticed.
How it helps: AWS Config continuously tracks configurations across your AWS resources. It also evaluates them against your defined compliance rules. You can use managed AWS Config Rules or create custom rules for your specific environment.
2. Enable CloudTrail and GuardDuty for Auditing and Threat Detection
What it solves: Auditing and detecting threats form the foundation of security and compliance. But many teams still forget to activate centralized logging. Others fail to proactively monitor their logs.
How it helps: AWS CloudTrail will record every API call and resource change across your AWS account. This will create a full audit trail for any security and compliance investigations you run. Amazon GuardDuty uses AI-driven threat detection to identify anomalies. These can include anything from compromised instances to account misuse.
3. Encrypt Data in Transit and at Rest with AWS KMS
What it solves: When you have unencrypted storage or unprotected communications, you leave yourself open to data breaches. Plus, many regulations mandate strong encryption.
How it helps: AWS Key Management Services (KMS) will allow you to encrypt sensitive data at rest and in transit. KMS also uses IAM to allow:
- Automated key rotation
- Centralized key control
- Fine-grained permissions
4. Apply Least Privilege IAM Roles and Use Service Control Policies
What it solves: Too many permissions lead to data exposure in the cloud, and admin-level access for everyday tasks creates unnecessary risk.
How it helps: When designing your IAM roles and policies, keep the principle of least privilege paramount. You should only give users, apps, and services the permissions that are absolutely needed. Service Control Policies (SCPs) in AWS Organizations offer a higher-level policy boundary. This will restrict actions across entire accounts or even companies.
5. Implement Automation for Security Groups, Patching, and Backups
What it solves: When you manage your infrastructure manually, you allow for inconsistencies. You also increase the probability of human error. Before you know it, you drift from your compliance baseline.
How it helps: When you automate your compliance-related tasks, you ensure consistency, repeatability, and a quicker threat response. DuploCloud automated compliance controls make adherence to regulatory standards effortless.
6. Centralize Logging and Monitoring
What it solves: When you’ve got services and accounts scattered with logs, your incident responses and audits are next to impossible to complete.
How it helps: When you centralize your logs with Amazon CloudWatch Logs or AWS CloudTrail, you can aggregate your logs from multiple accounts into a centralized S3 bucket for long-term storage.
7. Establish a Clear Tagging and Resource Management Strategy
What it solves: Without tagging, you’ll find it incredibly challenging to differentiate between production, development, and test environments. This makes it harder to correctly apply your compliance policies.
How it helps: You can consistently tag your resources with metadata like the environment, the owner, and the data classification. You can then use AWS Config Rules or your service control policies to apply different security postures to sensitive environments.
8. Train Your Teams on Compliance-Aware Development
What it solves: You can have the best tools, and compliance will still fail if your teams don’t understand your secure design practices.
How it helps: When you integrate your compliance training into your onboarding and ongoing professional development, you can encourage secure-by-default coding. You can also bring visibility to the ways in which your developers’ actions impact compliance.
9. Implement a DevSecOps Model to Shift Compliance Left
What it solves: Traditionally, compliance processes have been siloed and reactive, which causes delays. It also leads to your team missing requirements in the final stages of deployment.
How it helps: When you adopt a DevSecOps approach to security and compliance checks, you ensure any issues are caught early. This will cut way down on rework while simultaneously speeding up delivery.
How DuploCloud Simplifies AWS Compliance
To that end, DuploCloud is the premier DevSecOps automation platform to help your business achieve compliance out of the box. Here’s how it works:
- Built-in compliance for HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS, and more: Get audit-ready infrastructure without manual effort.
- IaC with compliant defaults: Infrastructure is provisioned with best-practice security baked in.
- Continuous policy enforcement: Avoid drift with automated checks and updates.
- Automated IAM, network, and encryption setup: Cut misconfigurations by automating core compliance requirements.
- Developer-friendly UI and APIs: Enable fast deployment without compromising on compliance or security.
With DuploCloud, you can abstract away the complexity that comes with manual compliance. This allows your teams to move faster and remain secure.
Compliance as Code: The Future of Cloud Security
Compliance as Code represents the future of cloud security because it “shifts left.” Essentially, it moves compliance and security checks up, closer to the earlier stages of the development lifecycle. So you’ve got Compliance as Code right in your CI/CD pipelines.
When you codify controls as part of infrastructure and application deployment, you can ensure:
- Repeatability
- Scalability
- Auditability
And you can make this happen across all of your environments.
This approach allows you to align your DevOps and your InfoSec teams by abstracting complex compliance requirements into automated, enforceable rules.
This reduces friction and improves collaboration. So you’ll have a faster, more secure cloud development.
DuploCloud Automates Your AWS Cloud Compliance
This modern environment now demands you achieve and maintain cloud compliance at all times. Plus, you must have a continuous, strategic process in place that allows you to scale and win the trust of your customers.
Yes. AWS provides a secure and compliant infrastructure, but it’s up to you to configure, monitor, and maintain your environment.
The good news is that when you automate and follow the best practices, compliance will no longer be a bottleneck.
That’s where DuploCloud comes in. We embed compliance directly into your infrastructure workflows. So your teams can hit the ground running, moving fast without stressing over security. Where you’re adhering to HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI DSS, or any other regulation, DuploCloud provides the automation you need.
You get:
- Built-in controls
- Policy enforcement
- Developer-friendly automation
So your cloud compliance becomes seamless.
Are you ready to simplify your AWS compliance?
Contact DuploCloud for a demo today to see how we can help.
FAQs
Does AWS guarantee compliance?
Nope. AWS provides a compliant infrastructure, but you will be responsible for configuring and maintaining your workloads.
Can I use AWS for HIPAA workloads?
Yes! But you need to sign a BAA with AWS and then put the right safeguards into place, like encryption, audit logging, and access control.
How does DuploCloud help with AWS compliance?
DuploCloud automates the provisioning of compliant infrastructure by embedding security and compliance requirements into our infrastructure-as-code platform.
What’s the difference between AWS compliance and my compliance?
AWS compliance only ensures that the underlying cloud services meet the proper standards. Your compliance is related to how you use and configure those services.
