Title: AWS re:Inforce 2024 - Simplify compliance and security investigations with generative AI (GRC204-NEW)

Insights:

• Introduction to Sanvi's Role: Sanvi is a new employee well-versed in security, compliance, and auditing needs in the cloud. She is learning AWS services and best practices for compliance.
• Daily Responsibilities: Sanvi's daily tasks include AWS audit reporting, resource compliance tracking, security investigations, and operational troubleshooting.
• AWS Config:
  • Functionality: AWS Config helps assess, audit, and evaluate environments by recording resource changes in a consistent format.
  • Capabilities: It supports managed and custom rules for compliance evaluation, remediation, automation, and data aggregation across regions.
  • Integration: Integrates with other AWS services like SNS for notifications, CloudWatch for metrics, and CloudTrail Lake for detailed logs.
  • New Feature: AWS Config now includes a generative AI-powered natural language query feature, simplifying the process for users with limited SQL skills.
• AWS CloudTrail:
  • Functionality: Tracks user and API activity across AWS environments, providing audit logs to determine who did what and when.
  • Components: Includes CloudTrail Trails, CloudWatch logs, and CloudTrail Lake for storing and analyzing logs.
  • Immutability: Ensures logs are stored immutably, with features like log file validation and retention even after deletion.
  • New Feature: CloudTrail Lake now supports generative AI-powered natural language queries, allowing users to ask questions in plain language and receive SQL-generated queries.
• Sanvi's Workflow:
  • Initial Investigation: Sanvi uses AWS Config to identify non-compliant S3 buckets and then uses CloudTrail to find out who made the bucket public.
  • Querying with AI: She leverages the new natural language query features in both AWS Config and CloudTrail Lake to expedite her investigations without deep SQL knowledge.
  • Detailed Analysis: Sanvi identifies the user responsible for making the bucket public and investigates further actions by this user to determine if the behavior is suspicious.
• Efficiency Gains: The generative AI-powered natural language query features significantly reduce the time required for compliance and security investigations, making the process more accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise.

Quotes:

• "So the topic that we're going to discuss today is simplified compliance and auditing on a daily basis."
• "AWS Config is a service that allows her to assess, audit, and evaluate the environments."
• "AWS Config generative AI-powered natural language query... allows her to search and query the current configuration of the AWS resources using plain natural language."
• "AWS CloudTrail is the service that will provide her all the audit logs in AWS environments."
• "CloudTrail Lake is a managed solution where you not only capture all of the audit logs, activity logs happening in AWS, it will immutably store and aggregate your logs from all regions, all accounts."
• "With CloudTrail Lake, if you need to write a query, if you have to ask a question, if you need to dive deep into CloudTrail logs, you can just come to CloudTrail Lake and ask a question, and then we will generate a query for you."
• "Sanvi was able to go from I know something, and then she was able to dive deep into every minute detail that was important for her to figure out if the situation was suspicious, if it required an action."