Use AWS Config to enforce compliance policies

What is AWS Config?

Did you know you can track every change in your AWS account, enforce compliance, and spot issues before they become problems. AWS Config gives you the power to monitor and manage your resources, ensuring they’re secure and compliant.

AWS Config helps you keep an eye on your AWS infrastructure by tracking changes over time. It records details like what changes were made, how resources are connected, and the overall state of your environment.

What Problems Does AWS Config Solve?

When managing cloud resources, it's easy to lose track of what you have and how everything is set up. AWS Config helps solve this problem by:

1. Tracking Changes: It keeps a detailed history of changes made to your resources. You can see who made changes, what was changed, and when it happened.
2. Compliance: It helps ensure that your resources comply with internal policies or external regulations. You can set rules and get alerts when something isn't right.
3. Auditing: When things go wrong, it can help you understand what changed and why. This is useful for troubleshooting and audits.
4. Resource Management: It gives you a clear picture of all your resources and how they are configured. This helps you manage them better.

How AWS Config Works

Here's a simple step-by-step explanation of how AWS Config works:

1. Setup: First, you enable AWS Config in your AWS account. You choose the resources you want to monitor and set up a configuration recorder.
2. Recording: The configuration recorder starts taking snapshots of your resources' configurations. It continuously records changes to your resources.
3. Storing: AWS Config stores these configuration snapshots and changes in an S3 bucket. This creates a historical record you can refer back to.
4. Evaluating: You set up rules to evaluate your resources' configurations. AWS Config checks your resources against these rules and marks them as compliant or non-compliant.
5. Notifying: If a resource becomes non-compliant, AWS Config can send you notifications through SNS. This way, you can take action to fix the issue.
6. Aggregating: If you use multiple AWS accounts, you can set up an aggregator to collect data from all of them. This gives you a complete view of your resources.

What Are the Benefits of AWS Config?

Using AWS Config offers several benefits:

1. Visibility: It provides a clear view of your resources and their configurations. You can easily see what you have and how it's set up.
2. Change Tracking: It helps you track changes over time. You can see who made changes, what was changed, and when it happened.
3. Compliance: It helps you ensure that your resources meet your compliance requirements. You can set up rules and get alerts when something isn't right.
4. Troubleshooting: It makes it easier to troubleshoot issues. You can see the history of changes to a resource and understand what might have caused a problem.
5. Auditing: It provides a detailed history of your resources' configurations, which is useful for audits and investigations.

Examples of AWS Config Use Cases

Let's look at some examples of how AWS Config can be used in real-world scenarios:

Ensure no security group permits traffic to all ports from all IPS

You can use AWS Config rules to ensure that security groups in your AWS account don't allow unrestricted access. If a security group is too open, AWS Config can notify you or automatically remediate the issue.

Compliance Audits

For industries with strict compliance requirements, AWS Config helps maintain a detailed record of resource configurations. This is useful for audits and ensuring compliance with standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

Enforce encryption on S3 buckets

If an S3 bucket is found without encryption, AWS Config can automatically apply the necessary encryption settings to bring it back into compliance.

Restrict EC2 instances from having Public IP

your organization wants to ensure that no EC2 instances in your AWS environment have public IP addresses. Public IPs can expose instances to the internet, potentially leading to security vulnerabilities and increased costs. Use the managed rule: ec2-instance-no-public-ip to ensure no public IP is attached to any EC2 instance.  

… and many more.

Conclusion

AWS Config is a powerful tool for managing and monitoring your AWS resources. It helps you keep track of changes, ensure compliance, troubleshoot issues, and manage your cloud environment more effectively. By using AWS Config, you gain better visibility and control over your resources, making it easier to maintain a well-managed and compliant AWS environment.

Here’s a terraform module that helps you get started with AWS config fast: GitHub - cloudposse/terraform-aws-config: This module configures AWS Config, a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.

Looking to setup compliance related systems for your cloud accounts? Reach out to us at https://kubeops.consulting! We have a lot of pre-build compliance policies to serve various industries. We also customise the policies to best suit your oganizational needs.