Title: AWS re:Inforce 2024 - Cloud compliance journey: Compliance and audits (GRC201)

Insights:

• Introduction and Agenda: The session, led by Jessie Skibby, Chad Lawrence, and Navas Kumar, covers cloud security governance, the importance of compliance, modernization of compliance, control automation, continuous compliance, and audit processes in AWS.
• Cloud Security Governance: Emphasizes the continuous cycle of risk assessment, threat modeling, incident response, and regulatory compliance. The goal is to build a framework that supports hybrid, multi-cloud, and AWS environments.
• Modernizing Compliance: Traditional compliance methods are inefficient due to human error, lost knowledge, and indirect costs. Modernizing compliance involves leveraging cloud capabilities to automate controls and reduce manual processes.
• Control Automation: AWS Config is highlighted as a key service for automating control implementation, identifying misconfigurations, and managing inventory. Config rules and conformance packs help streamline compliance across multiple accounts and regions.
• Continuous Compliance: Automating controls allows for continuous compliance, enabling instant audits and real-time compliance checks. This approach shifts compliance checks left, integrating them into the development pipeline.
• Cost and Efficiency: Automating controls can significantly reduce compliance costs. Studies show a 27-52% cost reduction in audit and compliance programs when a portion of controls are automated.
• Security Hub: Provides a unified dashboard for continuous monitoring and compliance assessment. It integrates with various AWS services and third-party tools, offering broad visibility and real-time feedback on compliance status.
• Proactive and Preventive Controls: Emphasizes the importance of proactive and preventive controls in the development pipeline to prevent non-compliant code from being deployed. This approach helps upskill developers and integrates compliance into the development process.
• Audit Manager and Artifact: AWS Audit Manager helps automate evidence collection and compliance reporting. The new Common Control Library allows for assessing once and applying to multiple frameworks. AWS Artifact provides on-demand access to AWS security and compliance reports.
• Shared Responsibility Model: Understanding the shared responsibility model is crucial for preparing for audits and regulatory reviews. AWS Artifact helps piece together AWS-managed controls with customer-managed controls.
• Future-Proofing Compliance: Leveraging AI/ML and Gen AI for compliance and audit processes. AWS services like Security Lake, QuickSight, and Bedrock enable advanced data analysis and real-time compliance insights.

Quotes:

• "We need to modernize our compliance approach so we're moving farther left."
• "27% of failed controls are due to human error. 33% of control failures are due to lost knowledge."
• "60% of all corporate data is now stored in the cloud that is only going to continue to increase."
• "You no longer need to rely on a spreadsheet to manage all these standards."
• "Automating controls allows you to shift to a component where you're no longer dependent on those people in the field."
• "If you have less than 50 controls and you automate 25% of them, you will have a 52 percent cost reduction in your audit and compliance program."
• "Security Hub is very powerful. It can feed all the way up to a central account that gives you visibility over your whole organization."
• "Developers do not like to be blocked. They learn really fast when you block them in the pipeline."
• "AWS Artifact is the auditor's best friend."
• "Think about where those tools that we talked about fit in your journey. The tools such as Config and Security Hub being used by dev teams, but having audit be visible to everyone."