Is AWS compliance causing you a headache? It can be challenging trying to balance your team’s productivity with cloud compliance.
With the right tools in place, AWS compliance can be completely put on autopilot.
Here is our list of the 9 best AWS compliance software:
- DivvyCloud Cloud-based solution that ensures compliance and security across single or multiple AWS environments through automation and reporting.
- AWS Security Hub An Amazon product that allows for integration with other Amazon security tools.
- AT&T USM Anywhere Provides compliance reports as well as cloud-based USM for AWS and other platforms.
- Nutanix Beam Comes with pre-packaged compliance scans for a variety of industries and requirements.
- Lacework Leverages its Polygraph algorithm to detect policy changes and anomalous behavior.
- AWS Artifact A free centralized resource for compliance-based reports, and other compliance assets.
- StackRox Identifies both internal and external policy and security threats
- Qualys Utilizes a ‘golden image’ to base new AWS containers to ensure proper settings are applied.
- AWS Control Tower Uses policies and controls to sync security settings over many AWS containers and environments.
The best AWS Compliance Software
1. DivvyCloud
DivvyCloud is a cloud-based software that specializes in monitoring your AWS environment for any misconfigurations, policy violations, or threats. A single agent reports back a multitude of data and actionable items regarding your AWS compliance status.
Out of the box, policies make DivvyCloud quick to deploy and avoid the headache of having to configure and program conditions yourself. Issues such as misconfigurations can automatically be remediated by the DivvyCloud agent. This leaves less work for you and your team to achieve cloud compliance. DivvyCloud works on your cloud network in real-time, meaning that if a misconfiguration is made, or policy is broken, automation can get to work fixing it, before it is exploited.
This automation is achieved through the use of ‘bots’ which are really a combination of templated and customized workflow rules. A single bot can be configured to push out remediation or changes across an entire cloud network based on certain thresholds or policy status. This solves both the AWS compliance issue as well enables you to scale solutions across your cloud network quickly.
Utilizing features in DivvyCloud such as Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps you create a zero-trust environment to protect your cloud from both internal and external threats. IAM works off the premise that everything must have an identity on the network.
Most networks struggle to maintain a balance of security and allow their employees to work effectively. IAM governance helps solve this by introducing security measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), account audits, and implementing a model of least privilege.
While cloud environments can be complex, DivvyCloud uses standardized terminology to describe issues on the dashboard, and in formal reports. This helps managers and executives better understand the platform and provides clarity to developers who may be working in hybrid cloud environments.
While many AWS compliance software provides protections, very few do it as fast and as seamlessly as DivvyCloud. If you’re a large company that heavily relies on AWS or similar cloud-based infrastructure, DivvyCloud is definitely worth checking out. You can request a trial or demo of DivvyCloud through their website below.
2. AWS Security Hub
AWS Security Hub is built by Amazon for your AWS compliance and security needs. AWS Security Hub markets itself as a single point of contact for all of your AWS management and regulatory compliance.
Security Hub pulls data from across all of your AWS containers to sort and prioritize security events or compliance issues and group them by container, group, server, or priority.
Monitoring is done on a continuous basis leveraging automated security checks and comparing your environment to AWS best practices and industry standards. In addition to automatic remediation, Security Hub integrates with Amazon Detective or Amazon Cloudwatch to manually review and escalate an issue to a security team for further review.
Over time Security Hub will continuously aggregate and prioritize its findings through AWS and other partnered AWS security services to ensure your environment is constantly updated and secure. By using the Security Hub you’ll undoubtedly save time manually sorting this security information and interpreting it.
Pricing for Security Hub is based on a per scan basis and starts at $0.001 per scan for the first 100,000 scans. This pricing model can be a bit confusing depending on the number of users you have, and the number of services you have scanning per hour or day.
You can test out AWS Security Hub through a free trial to see if it’s the right fit for you.
3. AT&T USM Anywhere
Formerly known as AlienVault USM, USM Anywhere aims to help cloud-based services prevent intrusions and help maintain compliance across your AWS environment. While USM Anywhere encompasses a large suite of tools, AWS compliance integration is relatively straightforward to set up, but would still need someone technical to appropriately follow the procedure.
Threat detection and AWS compliance data are pulled down through a sensor that is installed via your AWS dashboard. Once this sensor is installed and in place, it will begin pulling down information and compliance details to your dashboard. Once fully installed, the tool acts as a Unified Security Management (USM) tool to help highlight AWS compliance issues, intrusion detection, behavioral monitoring, and vulnerability assessments.
Within the first hour, the sensor will have likely picked up a number of issues that will be displayed in your dashboard. These are paired with further insights and recommended actions that should be taken. Automatic intrusion and threat detection policies are consistently updated to ensure your cloud servers are in line with AWS compliance.
While this solution may encompass many aspects of AWS compliance, it may be better suited for larger cloud-based businesses who are also looking for a UTM platform. Pricing starts at $1075 (£822.81) per month.
4. Nutanix Beam
Nutanix Beam, commonly referred to as Xi Beam, is a cloud-based tool that constantly monitors your environment with automated compliance checks and proactively rectifies security issues in real-time.
Xi Beam focuses heavily on automation, specifically automated remediation of security blindspots and compliance policy changes. In addition to providing AWS compliance assistance Xi Beam can provide consistent security across multiple cloud and hybrid environments. Bringing cloud security together in one place helps simplify policy remediations and provides clarity to your development and security team.
Compliance scans for your AWS environment are prepackaged and ready to deploy. Scan for PCI-DSS, HIPAA, NIST, and CIS violations in just a few clicks. Once you choose the scan you want to run Xi Beam can provide an automatically generated checklist based on your industry and compliance requirements so you know exactly what needs to be done.
Through security heat maps Xi Beam shows you exactly where the most vulnerable areas are in your AWS infrastructure and provides one-click solutions to rectify them. This gives you the freedom to understand what is getting changed, and why it’s getting changed before allowing Xi Beam to make those changes.
Over 250 predefined security audits scan for multiple different policy violations and provide remediations. While Xi Beam has many ready-to-use features it also provides flexibility to allow you to define your own internal compliance settings that you can choose to run across your entire organization, or across specific departments.
Xi Beam is a great option if you’re looking to not only improve your AWS compliance standing but also your overall cloud security posture. You can test out Xi Beam through a free 14-day trial.
5. Lacework
Lacework is a cloud-based security auditing tool designed to help provide AWS compliance as well as detecting cloud intrusion and other security risks associated with cloud-based platforms. Lacework focuses heavily on fast-paced environments and centers its service to allow security and compliance to not interfere with day to day operations or slow down productivity.
To maintain speed, Lacework utilizes a patented technology called Polygraph. The Polygraph system detects anomalies in your cloud network by building a deep baseline average over time. When drift is detected in your AWS compliance from this baseline, automated alerts or actions are configured to execute.
This technology can also help spot IaaS account configurations that violate compliance, as well as other security gaps and changes that put your AWS infrastructure at risk. In conjunction with Polography, Lacework also provides account auditing and managing by scanning for IAM vulnerabilities. These scans help prevent internal breaches that break compliance as well as weak accounts malicious actors could take advantage of.
Alerting can be customized to your liking but by default notifies you any time a configuration goes out of compliance. You can also enable alerts to let you know when you’re back in compliance, to ensure your security teams are working on issues in a timely manner.
Pricing for Laceword Cloud Security starts at $5000 (£3829.33) a year.
6. AWS Artifact
AWS Artifact is a free comprehensive resource center specifically dedicated to assisting your AWS compliance needs. While this isn’t a security auditing tool or threat detection system, AWS Artifact is a valuable tool that most cloud-based businesses aren’t taking advantage of.
Through a centralized dashboard, you’ll have access to a portfolio of compliance-related reporting, online agreements, and other documents to help you better track and manage your compliance across AWS systems.
Documents ranging from audit reports, workbooks, and agreements are all stored centrally in Artifact to assist in creating your own customized complaint environment. Reports such as Service Organizational Control (SOC), and Payment Card Industry (PCI) can all be downloaded in just a few minutes. You can also find Non-Disclosure Agreements and Business Associate Addendums for your use.
This is a better alternative than using expensive software to generate these reports, especially if you’re a smaller organization that already has a firm handle on compliance and security. Once again, AWS Artifact won’t proactively fix compliance issues or threats, this is simply a free resource center you can use to manage your AWS compliance reports.
AWS can be accessed directly from your AWS Dashboard.
7. StackRox
StackRox provides end to end security across your AWS infrastructure and monitors your Kubernetes environments running in AWS or AWS Outposts. Continuous with CIS and other benchmarks are applied to your AWS environment and alerting when any compliance settings or configurations are changed.
Best practices are applied to both Docker and Kubernetes as well as HIPAA, PIC, and NIST compliance policies. Non-compliant clusters or nodes can be individually identified via templated reports that are paired with the next steps for remediation.
In order to provide consistent AWS compliance, configuration management is deployed to monitor and audit the current status of the configuration, as well as alert to any changes whether they’re out of compliance or not. This helps identify unauthorized changes internally as well as ensures that your config remains in good standing.
StakRox also uses runtime detection and behavior modeling to detect and prevent runtime threats across your baseline. A full audit log of threat events are kept in case a forensic analysis would need to be done at a later time. As a threat or security event makes its way through the network you can customize the response the system takes. This could range from disabling a user account to running a script, or alerting a staff member.
Maintaining AWS compliance can involve many different moving parts, StackRox brings those elements together through a clean dashboard and fixes compliance issues via automated response.
You can test out StackRox free for 30-days.
8. Qualys Policy Compliance
Qualys provides AWS container security and compliance scanning to detect both internal configuration issues as well as vulnerabilities that could be exploited remotely. With a focus on continuous security and scanning, this approach ensures that all old and newly created containers in AWS adhere to compliance as well as best practices for cloud security.
This level monitoring is ideal for the DevOps process when deploying and creating new containers within AWS. Integrations allow for a holistic view of all containers across multiple cloud-based platforms to help centralize and simplify security compliance.
For fast compliance scanning, you can create a ‘golden image’ which Qualys uses to create and check policies. New containers can be configured to automatically look to the golden image to inherit best-practice configuration settings and match the golden image.
Qualys not only provides real-time alerts for detected threats but also updates and discloses information about the latest zero-day vulnerability discoveries and any network irregularities it may detect. Oftentimes this information is automated or overlooked, Qualys gives you the option to receive this information whether it’s actionable to your environment or not.
Utilizing Sigma Six process improvement, Qualys is able to quickly remediate compliance and security issues while maintaining an extremely high level of accuracy. Qualys offers a free 30-day trial to test out for yourself.
9. AWS Control Tower
AWS Control Tower is designed for larger enterprises with multiple AWS accounts and teams who need to ensure compliance as well as cloud governance among teams and departments.
If you find yourself deploying new AWS environments frequently, Control Tower is a useful tool to ensure your multi-account environment is following best security practices and is in accordance with AWS compliance rules.
Developers who build new AWS environments can use Control Tower to provision new accounts with best practice settings already pre-applied. This setup process is easy and feels much like following a blueprint. Prebuilt best practices can be applied for multi-account structures, federated access management, and account provisioning workflows.
Customized internal settings can also be created via template in conjunction with compliance rules. This gives you the freedom to easily deploy new accounts automatically with your own company policies already in place.
Control Tower features a setting called Guardrails, which establishes internal and external compliance policies to prevent the deployment of any resources which would break those policies. Alerts can be configured to your team to identify accounts that are non-compliant, as well as identify areas where an internal policy may need to be changed to allow for the proper workflow.
Lastly, Control Tower provides visual summaries of your AWS environment that allows you to view your compliance standings, user accounts, and Guardrails all from a single dashboard. This combined approach to AWS compliance gives your security team peace of mind, while also allowing employees to innovate and share data.
AWS Control Tower pricing is highly subject to your size and needs. Pricing varies depending on the number of objects you need to be configured, items scanned, and the number of log files you wish to store. You can view a detailed price breakdown with examples on the Control Tower pricing page.
Conclusion
Cloud infrastructure and AWS compliance can be tough to navigate. Whether it’s coordinating your compliance across multiple AWS environments, or simply ensuring your single cloud server is secure, there are challenges on both ends of the scale.
For a solution that caters to both large and small AWS environments, we recommend DivvyCloud for its quick deployment, ease of use, and ability to scale. DivvyCloud provides a unique ability to serve AWS compliance through both out-of-the-box solutions as well as feature-rich customizable scripts.
How do you track and monitor your AWS compliance? Is there software you love to use? Let us know in the comments below.
