Amazon Web Services (AWS) successfully completed an onboarding audit with no findings for ISO 9001:2015, 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, 27701:2019, 20000-1:2018, and 22301:2019, and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) v4.0. EY CertifyPoint auditors conducted the audit and reissued the certificates on August 13, 2025. The objective of the audit was to enable AWS to expand their ISO and CSA STAR certifications to include AWS Resource Explorer and AWS Incident Response to their scope. The ISO standards cover areas including quality management, information security, cloud security, privacy protection, service management, and business continuity. The certifications demonstrate AWS’s commitment to maintaining robust security controls and protecting customer data across our services.
During this onboarding audit, we added two additional AWS services to the scope since the last certification issued on May 26, 2025. The following are the two additional services:
For a full list of AWS services that are certified under ISO and CSA Star, see the AWS ISO and CSA STAR Certified page. Customers can also access the certifications in the AWS Management Console through AWS Artifact.
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We’re pleased to announce the completion of our annual AWS Outsourced Service Provider’s Audit Report (OSPAR) audit cycle on August 7, 2025, based on the newly enhanced version 2.0 guidelines (OSPAR v2.0). AWS is the first global cloud service provider in Singapore to obtain the report using the new OSPAR v2.0 guidelines.
The Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) established the Guidelines on Control Objectives and Procedures for Outsourced Service Providers (ABS Guidelines) to provide baseline controls criteria that outsourced service providers (OSPs) operating in Singapore should have in place. ABS enhanced the ABS Guidelines to version 2.0, which OSPs—such as AWS—need to comply with for the audit period commencing on or after January 1, 2025. The enhanced ABS Guidelines integrate key elements from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) regulatory updates on cyber hygiene, technology risk management, and business continuity management, and include new control domains such as data security, cryptography, software application development and management, and business continuity management.
The 2025 OSPAR certification cycle includes the addition of seven new services in scope, bringing the total number of services in scope to 170 in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Newly added services in scope include the following:
Successfully completing the OSPAR assessment demonstrates that AWS continues to maintain a robust system of controls to meet these guidelines. This underscores our commitment to fulfill the security expectations for cloud service providers set by the financial services industry in Singapore.Customers can use OSPAR to streamline their due diligence processes, thereby reducing the effort and costs associated with compliance. OSPAR remains a core assurance program for our financial services customers because it is closely aligned with local regulatory requirements from MAS.
As always, we’re committed to bringing new services into the scope of our OSPAR program based on your architectural and regulatory needs. If you have questions about the OSPAR report, contact your AWS account team.
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The NHS DSPT is an assessment that allows organizations to measure their performance against the National Data Guardian’s 10 data security standards. All organizations that access NHS patient data and systems are expected to use the toolkit to demonstrate their compliance with safe data security standards. NHS DSPT covers standards regarding Personal Confidential Data, Continuity Planning, IT Protection, and more. AWS undergoes the assessment to provide customers with assurance that we are practicing good data security.
Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. When customers move their computer systems and data to the cloud, security responsibilities are shared between the customer and the cloud service provider. For more information, see the AWS Shared Security Responsibility Model.
To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.
Reach out to your AWS account team if you have questions or feedback about NHS DSPT.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the successful completion of our annual audit to renew our Payment Card Industry Three Domain Secure (PCI 3DS) certification. As part of this renewal, we have expanded the scope to include three additional AWS services and three additional AWS Regions:
This certification allows customers to use these services while maintaining PCI 3DS compliance, enabling innovation without compromising security. The full list of services can be found on the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.
The PCI 3DS compliance package includes two key components:
Attestation of Compliance (AOC) – demonstrates that AWS was successfully validated against the PCI 3DS standard.
AWS Responsibility Summary – provides guidance to help AWS customers understand their responsibility in developing and operating a highly secure environment on AWS for handling payment card data.
AWS was evaluated by Coalfire, a third-party Qualified Security Assessor (QSA).
This refreshed certification offers customers greater flexibility in deploying regulated workloads while reducing compliance overhead. Customers can access the PCI 3DS reports through AWS Artifact. This self-service portal provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports, streamlining audit processes.
To learn more about our PCI programs and other compliance and security programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs page. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Compliance Support page.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that 177 AWS services have achieved HITRUST certification for the 2025 assessment cycle, including the following five services which were certified for the first time:
The full list of AWS services, which a third-party assessor audited and certified under the HITRUST CSF, is now available on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. Customers can view and download our 2025 HITRUST certification on demand through AWS Artifact.
AWS HITRUST certification is available for customer inheritance
As an added benefit to our customers, organizations no longer have to assess inherited controls for their HITRUST validated assessment because AWS already has. You can deploy business solutions to the AWS Cloud and inherit our HITRUST certification, provided that you use only in-scope services and properly apply the controls detailed on the HITRUST website according to the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.
Our HITRUST certification is based on the version 11.5.1 control framework, so you can inherit the latest controls and related scoring, knowing that AWS has attested to the latest framework standards available. Leading organizations in a variety of industries have adopted HITRUST CSF as part of their approach to security and privacy. For more information, see the HITRUST website.
As always, we value your feedback and questions and are committed to helping you achieve and maintain the highest standard of security and compliance. Feel free to contact the team through AWS Compliance Support. If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.
Customers new to Amazon OpenSearch Service often ask how many shards their indexes need. An index is a collection of shards, and an index’s shard count can affect both indexing and search request efficiency. OpenSearch Service can take in large amounts of data, split it into smaller units called shards, and distribute those shards across a dynamically changing set of instances.
In this post, we provide some practical guidance for determining the ideal shard count for your use case.
Shards overview
A search engine has two jobs: create an index from a set of documents, and search that index to compute the best-matching documents. If your index is small enough, a single partition on a single machine can store that index. For larger document sets, in cases where a single machine isn’t large enough to hold the index, or in cases where a single machine can’t compute your search results effectively, the index can be split into partitions. These partitions are called shards in OpenSearch Service. Each document is routed to a shard that is calculated, by default, by using a hash of that document’s ID.
A shard is both a unit of storage and a unit of computation. OpenSearch Service distributes shards across nodes in your cluster to parallelize index storage and processing. If you add more nodes to an OpenSearch Service domain, it automatically rebalances the shards by moving them between the nodes. The following figure illustrates this process.
As storage, primary shards are distinct from one another. The document set in one shard doesn’t overlap the document set in other shards. This approach makes shards independent for storage.
As computational units, shards are also distinct from one another. Each shard is an instance of an Apache Lucene index that computes results on the documents it holds. Because all the shards comprise the index, they must function together to process each query and update request for that index. To process a query, OpenSearch Service routes the query to a data node for a primary or replica shard. Each node computes its response locally and the shard responses get aggregated for a final response. To process a write request (a document ingestion or an update to an existing document), OpenSearch Service routes the request to the appropriate shards—primary then replica. Because most writes are bulk requests, all shards of an index are typically used.
The two different types of shards
There are two kinds of shards in OpenSearch Service—primary and replica shards. In an OpenSearch index configuration, the primary shard count serves to partition data and the replica count is the number of full copies of the primary shards. For example, if you configure your index with 5 primary shards and 1 replica, you will have a total of 10 shards: 5 primary shards and 5 replica shards.
The primary shard receives writes first. The primary shard passes documents to the replica shards for indexing by default. OpenSearch Service’s O-series instances use segment replication. By default, OpenSearch Service waits for acknowledgment from replica shards before confirming a successful write operation to the client. Primary and replica shards provide redundant data storage, enhancing cluster resilience against node failures. In the following example, the OpenSearch Service domain has three data nodes. There are two indexes, green (darker) and blue (lighter), each of which has three shards. The primary for each shard is outlined in red. Each shard also has a single replica, shown with no outline.
OpenSearch Service maps shards to nodes based on a number of rules. The most basic rule is that primary and replica shards are never put onto the same node. If a data node fails, OpenSearch Service automatically creates another data node and re-replicates shards from surviving nodes and redistributes them across the cluster. If primary shards fail, replica shards are promoted to primary to prevent data loss and provide continuous indexing and search operations.
So how many shards? Focus on storage first
There are three types of workloads that OpenSearch users typically maintain: search for applications, log analytics, and as a vector database. Search workloads are read-heavy and latency sensitive. They are typically tied to an application to enhance search capability and performance. A common pattern is to index the data in relational databases to give users more filtering capabilities and provide efficient full text search.
Log workloads are write-heavy and receive data continuously from applications and network devices. Typically, that data is put into a changing set of indexes, based on an indexing time period like daily or monthly depending on the use case. Instead of indexing based on time period, you can use rollover policies based on index size or document count to make sure shard sizing best practices are followed.
Vector database workloads use the OpenSearch Service k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) plugin to index vectors from an embedding pipeline. This enables semantic search, which measures relevance using the meaning of words rather than exactly matching the words. The embedding model from the pipeline maps multimodal data into a vector with potentially thousands of dimensions. OpenSearch Service searches across vectors to provide search results.
To determine the optimal number of shards for your workload, start with your index storage requirements. Although storage requirements can vary widely, a general guideline is to use 1:1.25 using the source data size to estimate usage. Also, compression algorithms default to performance, but can also be adjusted to reduce size. When it comes to shard sizes, consider the following based on the workload:
Search – Divide your total storage requirement by 30 GB.
If search latency is high, use a smaller shard size (as low as 10GB), increasing the shard count and parallelism for query processing.
Increasing the shard count reduces the amount of work at each shard (they have fewer documents to process), but also increases the amount of networking for distributing the query and gathering the response. To balance these competing concerns, examine your average hit count. If your hit count is high, use smaller shards. If your hit count is low, use larger shards.
Logs – Divide the storage requirement for your desired time period by 50 GB.
If using an ISM policy with rollover, consider setting the min_size parameter to 50 GB.
Increasing the shard count for logs workloads similarly improves parallelism. However, most queries for logs workloads have a small hit count, so query processing is light. Logs workloads work well with larger shard sizes, but shard smaller if your query workload is heavier.
Vector – Divide your total storage requirement by 50 GB.
Reducing shard size (as low as 10GB) can improve search latency when your vector queries are hybrid with a heavy lexical component. Conversely, increasing shard size (as high as 75GB) can improve latency when your queries are pure vector queries.
K-NN queries behave like highly filtered search queries, with low hit counts. Therefore, larger shards tend to work well. Be prepared to shard smaller when your queries are heavier.
Don’t be afraid of using a single shard
If your index contains less than the advised shard size (30 GB for search and 50 GB otherwise), we recommend that you use a single primary shard. Although it’s tempting to add more shards thinking it will improve performance, this approach can actually be counterproductive for smaller datasets because of the added networking. Each shard you add to an index distributes the processing of requests for that index across an additional node. Performance can decrease because there is overhead for distributed operations to split and combine results across nodes when a single node can do it sufficiently.
Set the shard count
When you create an OpenSearch index, you set the primary and replica counts for that index. Because you can’t dynamically change the primary shard count of an existing index, you have to make this important configuration decision before indexing your first document.
You set the shard count using the OpenSearch create index API. For example (provide your OpenSearch Service domain endpoint URL and index name):
If you have a single index workload, you only have to do this one time, when you create your index for the first time. If you have a rolling index workload, you create a new index regularly. Use the index template API to automate applying settings to all new indexes whose name matches the template. The following example sets the shard count for any index whose name has the prefix logs (provide your OpenSearch service endpoint domain URL and index template name):
This post outlined basic shard sizing best practices, but additional factors might influence the ideal index configuration you choose to implement in your OpenSearch Service domain.
For more information about sharding, refer to Optimize OpenSearch index shard sizes or Shard strategy. Both resources can help you better fine-tune your OpenSearch Service domain to optimize its available compute resources.
About the authors
Tom Burns is a Senior Cloud Support Engineer at AWS and is based in the NYC area. He is a subject matter expert in Amazon OpenSearch Service and engages with customers for critical event troubleshooting and improving the supportability of the service. Outside of work, he enjoys playing with his cats, playing board games with friends, and playing competitive games online.
Ron Miller is a Solutions Architect based out of NYC, supporting transportation and logistics customers. Ron works closely with AWS’s Data & Analytics specialist organization to promote and support OpenSearch. On the weekend, Ron is a shade tree mechanic and trains to complete triathlons.
The AWS Security Reference Architecture (AWS SRA) provides prescriptive guidance for deploying AWS security services in a multi-account environment. However, validating that your implementation aligns with these best practices can be challenging and time-consuming.
Today, we’re announcing the open source release of SRA Verify, a security assessment tool that helps you assess your organization’s alignment to the AWS SRA.
The AWS SRA is a holistic set of guidelines for deploying the full complement of AWS security services in a multi-account environment. You can use it to design, implement, and manage AWS security services so that they align with AWS recommended practices. The recommendations are built around a single-page architecture that includes AWS security services—how they help achieve security objectives, where they can be best deployed and managed in your AWS accounts, and how they interact with other security services. This overall architectural guidance complements detailed, service-specific recommendations such as those found in AWS Security Documentation.
SRA Verify directly maps to these recommendations by providing automated checks that validate your implementation against the AWS SRA guidance. The tool helps you verify that security services are properly configured according to the reference architecture. To assist with remediation and implementing the guidance in the AWS SRA, review the infrastructure as code (IaC) examples in the AWS Security Reference Architecture Github repo.
At Amazon Web Services (AWS), customer privacy and security are our top priority. We provide our customers with industry-leading privacy and security when they use the AWS Cloud anywhere in the world. In recent months, we’ve noticed an increase in inquiries about how we manage government requests for data. While many of the questions center around a 2018 U.S. law known as the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), the CLOUD Act in fact did not give the U.S. government any new authority to compel data from providers and provides critical legal guardrails to protect content.
To put this whole issue in context—there have been no data requests to AWS that resulted in disclosure to the U.S. government of enterprise or government content data stored outside the U.S. since we started reporting the statistic in 2020. Our commitment to protecting customer data is underpinned by several layers of legal, technical, and operational protection. For example, AWS has designed its core products and services to prevent anyone but the customer and those authorized by the customer from accessing the customer’s content. And in these instances, any government that wants access to the customer’s content would have to seek that data directly from the customer. Additionally, U.S. law itself provides numerous statutory protections that help lower the risk that AWS could be required to disclose enterprise or government content data, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has implemented additional operational protections over the past eight years.
With that in mind, we want to address some common misconceptions about the CLOUD Act and provide some clarity about how this law impacts—or doesn’t impact—AWS customers worldwide. We’re also expanding our FAQs on the CLOUD Act to help our customers and partners better navigate this topic.
Fact 1: The CLOUD Act does not give the U.S. government unfettered or automatic access to data stored in the cloud
The CLOUD Act was passed to address challenges law enforcement faced in obtaining data stored abroad in cross-border investigations involving serious crimes, ranging from terrorism and violent crime to sexual exploitation of children and cybercrime. The CLOUD Act primarily enabled the U.S. to enter into reciprocal executive agreements with trusted foreign partners to obtain access to electronic evidence for investigations of serious crimes, wherever the evidence happens to be located, by lifting blocking statutes under U.S. law. Many governments rely on domestic laws to require providers within their jurisdiction to disclose electronic data under the companies’ control, regardless of where the data is stored. Similarly, The CLOUD Act clarified that U.S. law enforcement can use existing authorities such as a court-approved search warrant to compel data within a provider’s control, regardless of where the data is stored; the executive agreements enable the effectiveness of these reciprocal laws, supported by strong procedural and substantive safeguards.
Access to data under U.S. law is far from unfettered or automatic, and law enforcement must meet strict legal standards. Under U.S. law, providers are actually prohibited from disclosing data to the U.S. government absent a legal exception. To compel a provider to disclose content data, law enforcement must convince an independent federal judge that probable cause exists related to a particular crime, and that evidence of the crime will be found in the place to be searched (that is, a specific electronic account such as an email account). This legal standard must be established through specific and trustworthy facts. Each search warrant must pass this stringent probable cause determination using credible facts, particularity, and legality, must receive approval from an independent judge, and must meet requirements regarding scope and jurisdiction. In May 2023, the DOJ also issued a policy that prosecutors seeking evidence known to be located abroad must obtain approval from Department’s Office of International Affairs (OIA) prior to obtaining an order for such evidence. The DOJ policy on evidence abroad notes that every nation enacts laws to protect its sovereignty; OIA works to address these issues and assist prosecutors in selecting an appropriate mechanism to secure evidence.
Fact 2: AWS has not disclosed any enterprise or government customer content data under the CLOUD Act since we started tracking the statistic
AWS has rigorous procedures in place for handling law enforcement requests from any country to validate legitimacy and verify that they comply with applicable law. AWS recognizes the legitimate needs of law enforcement agencies in investigating criminal and terrorist activity, but they must observe legal safeguards for conducting such investigations. We do not disclose customer data in response to any government request unless we are obligated to do so by a legally valid and binding order. We have publicly committed to this in our legal terms. Additionally, we will challenge government requests that conflict with the law, are overbroad, or are otherwise inappropriate (for example, if such a request would violate individuals’ fundamental rights). When we receive such requests for enterprise customer content, we make every reasonable effort to redirect law enforcement to the customer and notify the customer when legally permitted. If we are required to disclose customer content, we notify customers before disclosure to provide them an opportunity to seek protection from disclosure unless prohibited by law. If after exhausting these steps, AWS remains compelled to disclose customer data, and we have the technical ability to do so (which, as described above, in many instances we do not), we disclose only the minimum necessary to satisfy the legal process.
Consistent with our policy to redirect law enforcement to customers, the DOJ’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section has also issued guidance advising prosecutors to generally seek data directly from an enterprise, such as a company that stores data with a cloud provider, rather than from the provider.
A clear measure of the effectiveness of our measures and the rigorous legal requirements embodied in law is the fact that since we began reporting this statistic in 2020, AWS has not disclosed any enterprise or government customer content data stored outside the U.S. to the U.S. government. This record reflects the technical safeguards AWS offers, the robust legal protections within U.S. law, policies implemented by the DOJ, and the nature of law enforcement investigations which primarily focus on collecting electronic evidence from consumer accounts.
Fact 3: The CLOUD Act does not only apply to U.S.-headquartered companies—it applies to all providers that do business in the United States
The CLOUD Act applies to all electronic communication service or remote computing service providers that operate or have a legal presence in the U.S.—regardless of where their headquarters are located. For example, European-headquartered cloud providers with U.S. operations are also subject to the Act’s requirements. OVHcloud, a French headquartered cloud service provider that operates in the U.S., notes in its CLOUD Act FAQ page that “OVHcloud will comply with lawful requests from public authorities. Under the CLOUD Act, that could include data stored outside of the United States.” Similarly, other cloud providers headquartered in the E.U. and elsewhere, also have operations in the U.S.
Fact 4: The principles in the CLOUD Act are consistent with international law and the laws of other countries
The CLOUD Act did not introduce a new legal concept regarding the scope of electronic data that must be disclosed as part of legitimate criminal investigations. Many countries require disclosure of customer data wherever it’s stored in response to legal process involving serious crimes. The United Kingdom’s (U.K.’s) Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act, for instance, allows U.K. law enforcement agencies to obtain stored electronic data located outside of the U.K. in connection to a criminal investigation. According to a 2024 filing by the U.S. DOJ, the laws of several European Union member states, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, and Spain, have similar requirements. In fact, since 2023, most law enforcement requests that AWS receives come from authorities outside of the United States.
This concept is also enshrined within the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which was the first international treaty aimed at improving cooperation in investigations of cybercrimes. Additionally, the EU’s e-Evidence Regulation, 2023/1543, adopted in August 2023, authorizes Member States to “order a service provider…to produce or preserve electronic evidence regardless of the location of data.” The GDPR also allows for transfers of personal data in response to compelled disclosure requests from third countries, provided that the relevant party can cite an appropriate legal basis and transfer mechanism or derogation (see EDPB’s recent Guidelines 02/2024 on Article 48).
AWS is advocating for governments to conclude reciprocal executive agreements under the CLOUD Act, including between the U.S. and the European Union, and the U.S. and Canada. We believe these agreements are important to definitively resolve potential conflicts of law and enable effective investigation of serious crimes to advance public safety, while recognizing the strong substantive and procedural safeguards that already exist under U.S. law.
Fact 5: The CLOUD Act does not limit the technical measures and operational controls AWS offers to customers to prevent unauthorized access to customer data
We can only respond to legal requests for data where we have the technical ability to do so. AWS has a number of products and services designed to make sure that no one—not even AWS operators—can access customer content. AWS customers also have a range of additional technical measures and operational controls to prevent access to data. For example, many of the AWS core systems and services are designed with zero operator access, meaning the services don’t have any technical means for AWS operators to access customer data in response to a legal request.
The AWS Nitro System, which is the foundation of AWS computing services, uses specialized hardware and software to protect data from outside access during processing on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). By providing a strong physical and logical security boundary, Nitro is designed so that no unauthorized person—not even AWS operators—can access customer workloads on EC2. The design of the Nitro System has been validated by the NCC Group, an independent cybersecurity firm. The controls that help prevent operator access are so fundamental to the Nitro System that we’ve added them in our AWS Service Terms to provide an additional contractual assurance to all of our customers.
We also give customers features and controls to encrypt data, whether in transit, at rest, or in memory. All AWS services already support encryption, with most also supporting encryption with customer managed keys that are inaccessible to AWS. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is the first highly scalable, cloud-native key management system with FIPS 140-3 Security Level 3 certification. In plain English, this means AWS offers encryption that is super strong and where our customers control who gets a key.
Continuing our customer obsession
At AWS, our customer-first approach drives everything we do—from how we design our services to how we protect your data. We understand that your trust is earned through transparency, strong technical controls, and unwavering advocacy for your interests. That’s why we’ve been clear about how we handle government requests for data, including the impact of the CLOUD Act, and the multiple layers of protection—legal, operational, and technical—to safeguard your data.
We encourage you to learn more about this important topic by reviewing our expanded CLOUD Act FAQ. We will continue to innovate on your behalf, building new features and services that put you in control of your data, and maintaining our commitment to the highest standards of privacy and security.
French version
CLOUD Act : cinq points clés pour comprendre son fonctionnement réel
Chez Amazon Web Services (AWS), la confidentialité et la sécurité des clients constituent notre priorité absolue. Nous mettons à leur disposition une confidentialité et une sécurité à la pointe de l’industrie lorsqu’ils utilisent le Cloud AWS, partout dans le monde. Ces derniers mois, nous avons constaté une augmentation des questions concernant notre gestion des demandes d’accès aux données émanant d’autorités gouvernementales. Si de nombreuses interrogations portent sur une loi américaine de 2018 connue sous le nom de Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), cette loi n’a en réalité octroyé aucune nouvelle prérogative au gouvernement américain pour contraindre les fournisseurs à divulguer des données. Elle prévoit des garde-fous juridiques essentiels pour protéger les données des utilisateurs.
Replaçons cette question en perspective : depuis que nous avons commencé à publier des rapports sur les demandes d’informations en 2020, aucune demande n’a abouti à la divulgation auprès du gouvernement américain, de données d’entreprises ou de gouvernements stockées hors des États-Unis. Notre engagement à protéger les données de nos clients repose sur plusieurs niveaux de protection juridique, technique et opérationnelle. A titre d’exemple, les principaux produits et services d’AWS ont été conçus by design de manière à empêcher quiconque, hormis le client et les personnes autorisées par celui-ci, d’accéder à ses données. Ainsi, toute autorité gouvernementale souhaitant accéder aux données d’un client doit en faire la demande directement auprès de celui-ci. En outre, la législation américaine prévoit elle-même de nombreuses protections statutaires qui limitent la possibilité qu’AWS soit contrainte de divulguer des données d’entreprises ou de gouvernements. Le Département de la Justice américain (DOJ) a mis en place des mesures de protections supplémentaires au cours des huit dernières années d’un point de vue opérationnel.
Dans ce contexte, nous souhaitons revenir sur certaines idées reçues courantes à propos du CLOUD Act et apporter des éclaircissements sur l’impact – ou l’absence d’impact – de cette loi sur les clients d’AWS dans le monde entier. Afin d’aider nos clients et partenaires à mieux appréhender ce sujet, nous avons également complété notre FAQ sur le CLOUD Act.
Fait n°1 : Le CLOUD Act n’accorde pas au gouvernement américain un accès illimité ou automatique aux données stockées dans le cloud
Le CLOUD Act a été adopté pour répondre aux défis rencontrés par les autorités judiciaires dans l’obtention des données stockées à l’étranger dans le cadre d’enquêtes transfrontalières sur des crimes graves, allant du terrorisme et des crimes violents à l’exploitation sexuelle d’enfants et à la cybercriminalité. Le CLOUD Act a principalement permis aux États-Unis de conclure des accords exécutifs réciproques avec des partenaires étrangers de confiance. Ces accords visent à faciliter l’accès aux preuves électroniques dans le cadre d’enquêtes sur des crimes graves, indépendamment de la localisation de ces preuves. Pour ce faire, le CLOUD Act lève certaines restrictions prévues par la législation américaine.
De nombreux gouvernements s’appuient sur leurs lois nationales pour exiger des fournisseurs assujettis à ces lois qu’ils divulguent des données électroniques sous leur contrôle, indépendamment du lieu de stockage de ces données. De même, le CLOUD Act a clarifié que les autorités judiciaires américaines pouvaient s’appuyer sur les dispositifs légaux existants, tel qu’un mandat de perquisition autorisé par un tribunal, pour exiger d’un fournisseur la divulgation de données sous son contrôle, indépendamment de leur localisation. Les accords exécutifs bilatéraux permettent la mise en œuvre effective de ces accords de réciprocité, encadrée par des garanties procédurales et juridiques rigoureuses.
L’accès à des données en vertu de la loi américaine est loin d’être illimité ou automatique, et les autorités judiciaires doivent respecter des conditions juridiques strictes. En vertu de la loi américaine, il est de fait interdit aux fournisseurs de divulguer des données au gouvernement américain, sauf exception spécifique. Pour contraindre un fournisseur à la divulgation de données, les autorités judiciaires doivent démontrer devant un juge fédéral indépendant qu’il existe des indices graves et concordants relatifs à un crime et qu’il est probable que des éléments de preuve de ce crime se trouvent dans le périmètre visé par la perquisition (par exemple, un compte électronique spécifique tel qu’une messagerie). La mise en œuvre de cette exception doit s’appuyer sur des éléments factuels précis et vérifiables.
Chaque mandat de perquisition est soumis à cette évaluation stricte de la présence d’indices graves et concordants, qui doit reposer sur des faits crédibles, respecter les critères de spécificité et de légalité, être autorisé par un juge indépendant et satisfaire aux conditions de compétence matérielle et juridictionnelle. En mai 2023, le DOJ a par ailleurs publié des directives imposant aux procureurs qui recherchent des preuves localisées à l’étranger d’obtenir préalablement l’autorisation du Bureau des Affaires Internationales (OIA) avant d’obtenir toute ordonnance. La politique du DOJ concernant les preuves situées à l’étranger reconnaît que chaque État adopte des lois pour protéger sa souveraineté. L’OIA intervient pour traiter ces questions et accompagner les procureurs dans l’identification des mécanismes appropriés d’obtention des preuves.
Fait n°2 : Depuis la mise en place du suivi statistique, AWS n’a divulgué aucune donnée d’entreprise ou de gouvernement en vertu du CLOUD Act
AWS applique des procédures strictes pour traiter les demandes des autorités judiciaires de tout pays, en vérifiant leur légitimité et leur conformité à la réglementation applicable. Si AWS reconnaît les besoins légitimes des autorités judiciaires dans leurs enquêtes sur les activités criminelles et terroristes, les autorités doivent respecter les mesures de protection juridiques encadrant ces enquêtes. En effet, notre politique est claire : nous ne divulguons pas les données des clients en réponse à une demande gouvernementale, sauf si nous en sommes contraints par une ordonnance juridiquement valide et contraignante. Nous avons pris cet engagement publiquement dans nos conditions juridiques.
Nous contestons les demandes gouvernementales qui s’avèrent illégales, disproportionnées ou inappropriées (notamment celles qui porteraient atteintes aux droits fondamentaux des individus). Pour les demandes concernant les données d’entreprises clientes, nous mettons tout en œuvre pour rediriger les autorités judiciaires vers le client et l’informer lorsque la loi le permet. En cas d’obligation de divulgation des données d’un client, nous l’en informons au préalable pour lui permettre de se prémunir contre cette divulgation, sauf interdiction par la loi. Si, après ces étapes, AWS reste contrainte de divulguer des données client et dispose de la capacité technique de le faire (ce qui, comme mentionné précédemment, est rarement le cas), nous limitons la divulgation au strict minimum requis par la procédure judiciaire.
Conformément à notre politique de redirection des autorités judiciaires vers les clients, le département des crimes informatiques et de la propriété intellectuelle du DOJ américain a également émis des lignes directrices recommandant aux procureurs de privilégier l’obtention des données directement auprès de l’entreprise concernée, plutôt qu’auprès du fournisseur cloud hébergeant ces données.
Une preuve tangible de l’efficacité de nos mesures et des exigences juridiques rigoureuses inscrites dans la loi : depuis le début du suivi de cette statistique en 2020, AWS n’a divulgué au gouvernement américain aucune donnée de client d’entreprise ou de gouvernement stockée hors des États-Unis. Ce bilan résulte des garanties techniques offertes par AWS, des conditions juridiques strictes prévues par la législation américaine, des politiques mises en œuvre par le DOJ, et de la nature des enquêtes des autorités judiciaires qui ciblent principalement la collecte de preuves électroniques issues de comptes de particuliers.
Fait n°3 : Le CLOUD Act ne s’applique pas uniquement aux entreprises dont le siège est situé aux États-Unis, mais à toute entreprise exerçant une activité commerciale aux États-Unis
Le CLOUD Act s’applique à l’ensemble des fournisseurs de services de communication électronique ou de services informatiques à distance qui exercent une activité ou disposent d’une présence juridique aux États-Unis, indépendamment de la localisation de leur siège social. Par conséquent, les fournisseurs de services cloud européens ayant des activités aux États-Unis sont également assujettis aux dispositions de cette loi. À titre d’exemple, OVHcloud, entreprise française de services cloud présente aux États-Unis, précise dans sa FAQ relative au CLOUD Act qu’”OVHcloud se conformera aux demandes légales des autorités publiques. En vertu du CLOUD Act, cela pourrait inclure des données stockées en dehors des États-Unis.” De même, d’autres fournisseurs de cloud dont le siège est situé dans l’Union européenne ou ailleurs exercent également des activités aux États-Unis.
Fait n°4 : Les principes du CLOUD Act s’inscrivent dans le cadre du droit international et des législations nationales
Le CLOUD Act n’a pas introduit de nouveau concept juridique concernant l’accès aux données électroniques dans le cadre d’enquêtes pénales. De nombreux États exigent la divulgation de données clients quel que soit leur lieu de stockage en réponse à des procédures judiciaires impliquant des crimes graves. La loi britannique Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act, par exemple, permet aux autorités judiciaires britanniques d’obtenir des données électroniques stockées hors du Royaume-Uni dans le cadre d’une enquête pénale. Selon un document du DOJ américain publié en 2024, plusieurs États membres de l’Union européenne, dont la Belgique, le Danemark, la France, l’Irlande et l’Espagne, disposent d’exigences similaires. En réalité, depuis 2023, la majorité des demandes d’accès aux données reçues par AWS émanent d’autorités situées en dehors des États-Unis.
Ce principe est également inscrit dans la Convention de Budapest sur la cybercriminalité, premier traité international visant à renforcer la coopération en matière d’enquêtes sur la cybercriminalité. Par ailleurs, le Règlement européen e-Evidence (2023/1543), adopté en août 2023, habilite les États membres à “ordonner à un fournisseur de services de produire ou de conserver des preuves électroniques, quelle que soit la localisation des données.” Le RGPD prévoit également la possibilité de transferts de données personnelles en réponse aux demandes contraignantes de pays tiers, sous réserve d’une base juridique appropriée et d’un mécanisme de transfert ou d’une dérogation (voir les Lignes directrices 02/2024 du Comité européen de la protection des données sur l’Article 48).
AWS soutient la conclusion d’accords de coopération bilatéraux dans le cadre du CLOUD Act, notamment entre les États-Unis et l’Union européenne, ainsi qu’entre les États-Unis et le Canada. Ces accords sont essentiels pour résoudre les conflits potentiels de lois et permettre des enquêtes efficaces sur les crimes graves afin d’améliorer la sécurité publique, tout en s’appuyant sur les garanties procédurales et juridiques substantielles déjà prévues par la législation américaine.
Fait n°5 : Le CLOUD Act n’a pas d’impact sur les dispositifs techniques et les mesures de contrôle qu’AWS met à disposition de ses clients pour prévenir tout accès non autorisé à leurs données
AWS ne peut répondre aux demandes judiciaires de communication de données que lorsqu’elle dispose de la capacité technique de le faire. Or, AWS a développé de nombreux produits et services garantissant qu’aucun tiers – y compris ses propres employés – ne peut accéder aux données des clients. Les clients d’AWS ont également à leur disposition un ensemble de dispositifs techniques et de mesures de contrôle complémentaires pour protéger leurs données. À titre d’exemple, la plupart des principaux systèmes et services d’AWS sont conçus sans aucune possibilité d’accès technique, selon le principe d’absence d’accès pour les opérateurs (zero operator access). Cela signifie que les services ne disposent d’aucun moyen technique permettant aux opérateurs d’AWS d’accéder aux données des clients en réponse à une demande judiciaire.
Le système AWS Nitro, qui est à la base des services informatiques AWS, utilise des composants matériels et logiciels spécifiques pour protéger les données de tout accès externe lors de leur traitement sur Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). En établissant une barrière physique et logique renforcée, le système Nitro est conçu de sorte qu’aucune personne non autorisée – y compris les opérateurs d’AWS – ne peut accéder aux charges de travail des clients sur EC2. L’architecture du système Nitro a été certifiée par NCC Group, organisme indépendant en cybersécurité. Ces dispositifs de contrôle empêchant tout accès de nos opérateurs sont si essentiels au système Nitro que nous les avons intégrés dans nos Conditions de Service AWS, offrant ainsi une garantie contractuelle supplémentaire à l’ensemble de nos clients.
Nous proposons également à nos clients des fonctionnalités et des mécanismes de chiffrement des données, qu’elles soient en transit, au repos ou en mémoire. L’ensemble des services AWS intègrent le chiffrement, la majorité permettant également le chiffrement via des clés gérées par le client et inaccessibles à AWS. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) est le premier système de gestion de clés natif au cloud, hautement évolutif, à obtenir la certification FIPS 140-3 Niveau 3. Concrètement, AWS propose un chiffrement de niveau supérieur où les clients conservent le contrôle exclusif de l’accès aux clés.
Poursuivre notre obsession client
Chez AWS, notre approche centrée sur le client guide l’ensemble de nos actions, de la conception de nos services à la protection de vos données. La confiance que vous nous accordez repose sur notre transparence, la robustesse de nos dispositifs techniques de contrôle et notre détermination à défendre vos intérêts.
C’est dans cet esprit que nous avons établi une communication claire et transparente sur notre traitement des demandes d’accès aux données émanant des autorités, notamment concernant l’application du CLOUD Act, ainsi que sur les différents niveaux de protection – juridiques, opérationnels et techniques – mis en œuvre pour sécuriser vos données.
Nous vous invitons à approfondir vos connaissances de ce sujet en consultant notre FAQ détaillée sur le CLOUD Act.
Nous poursuivrons nos efforts d’innovation, à votre service, en développant de nouvelles fonctionnalités et de nouveaux services vous garantissant la maîtrise de vos données, tout en maintenant nos engagements en matière de confidentialité et de sécurité.
A propos de l’auteur
Bob Kimball occupe le poste de Chief Regulatory Officer après avoir été General Counsel d’AWS. Dans ses fonctions actuelles, il pilote les questions réglementaires mondiales d’AWS, travaillant en étroite collaboration avec les régulateurs et les clients sur des enjeux tels que l’IA, la souveraineté numérique, l’énergie et d’autres sujets clés liés à l’exploitation des infrastructures et services cloud.
German version
Fünf Fakten zur tatsächlichen Funktionsweise des CLOUD Act
Bei Amazon Web Services (AWS) haben Kundendatenschutz und -sicherheit höchste Priorität. Wir bieten unseren Kunden branchenführenden Datenschutz und erstklassige Sicherheit bei der Nutzung der AWS Cloud – weltweit. In den vergangenen Monaten haben wir ein gestiegenes Interesse zum Umgang mit behördlichen Datenanfragen festgestellt. Viele dieser Fragen beziehen sich auf ein US-amerikanisches Gesetz aus dem Jahr 2018, den Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act). Tatsächlich hat der CLOUD Act der US-Regierung keinerlei neue Befugnisse eingeräumt, Daten von Anbietern anzufordern, sondern schafft vielmehr wichtige rechtliche Leitplanken zum Schutz von Inhalten.
Um diese Thematik in den richtigen Kontext zu setzen: Seit wir 2020 mit der statistischen Erfassung begonnen haben, gab es keine Datenanfragen an AWS, die zur Offenlegung von außerhalb der USA gespeicherten Kundeninhalten von Unternehmens- oder Regierungsdaten gegenüber der US-Regierung geführt haben. Unser Engagement zum Schutz von Kundendaten wird durch mehrere Ebenen rechtlichen, technischen und operativen Schutzes untermauert. AWS hat beispielsweise seine Kernprodukte und -services so konzipiert, dass nur Kunden selbst und die von ihnen autorisierten Personen auf die Kundeninhalte zugreifen können. In diesen Fällen müsste jede Regierung, die Zugriff auf Kundeninhalte wünscht, diese Daten direkt beim Kunden anfragen. Darüber hinaus bietet das US-Recht selbst zahlreiche gesetzliche Schutzmaßnahmen, die das Risiko verringern, dass AWS zur Offenlegung von Unternehmens- oder Regierungsdaten verpflichtet werden könnte. Das US-Justizministerium (DOJ) hat in den letzten acht Jahren zusätzliche operative Schutzmaßnahmen implementiert.
Vor diesem Hintergrund möchten wir einige häufige Missverständnisse über den CLOUD Act ansprechen und Klarheit darüber schaffen, wie sich dieses Gesetz auf AWS Kunden weltweit auswirkt – oder eben nicht auswirkt. Außerdem erweitern wir unsere FAQ zum CLOUD Act, um unseren Kunden und Partnern den Umgang mit diesem Thema zu erleichtern.
Fakt 1: Der CLOUD Act gewährt der US-Regierung keinen uneingeschränkten oder automatischen Zugriff auf in der Cloud gespeicherte Daten
Der CLOUD Act wurde verabschiedet, um Herausforderungen zu bewältigen, denen Strafverfolgungsbehörden bei der Beschaffung von im Ausland gespeicherten Daten in grenzüberschreitenden Ermittlungen zu schweren Straftaten begegneten. Dazu gehören Terrorismus und Gewaltverbrechen bis hin zu sexueller Ausbeutung von Kindern und Cyberkriminalität. Der CLOUD Act ermöglicht es den USA in erster Linie, gegenseitige Vollzugsvereinbarungen mit vertrauenswürdigen ausländischen Partnern zu schließen, um Zugang zu elektronischen Beweismitteln für Ermittlungen bei schweren Straftaten zu erhalten, unabhängig vom Speicherort der Beweise, indem Sperrgesetze nach US-Recht aufgehoben wurden. Viele Regierungen stützen sich auf nationale Gesetze, um von Anbietern innerhalb ihres Zuständigkeitsbereichs die Offenlegung elektronischer Daten unter der Kontrolle der Unternehmen zu verlangen, unabhängig davon, wo die Daten gespeichert sind. In ähnlicher Weise stellte der CLOUD Act klar, dass US-Strafverfolgungsbehörden bestehende Befugnisse wie einen gerichtlich genehmigten Durchsuchungsbeschluss nutzen können, um Daten unter der Kontrolle eines Anbieters anzufordern, unabhängig vom Speicherort der Daten; die Vollzugsvereinbarungen ermöglichen die Wirksamkeit dieser gegenseitigen Gesetze, unterstützt durch strenge verfahrensrechtliche und materielle Schutzmaßnahmen.
Der Zugriff auf Daten nach US-Recht ist bei weitem nicht uneingeschränkt oder automatisch möglich, und Strafverfolgungsbehörden müssen strenge rechtliche Standards erfüllen. Nach US-Recht ist es Anbietern sogar untersagt, Daten ohne rechtliche Ausnahmeregelung an die US-Regierung weiterzugeben. Um einen Anbieter zur Offenlegung von Inhaltsdaten zu verpflichten, muss die Strafverfolgungsbehörde einen unabhängigen Bundesrichter davon überzeugen, dass ein hinreichender Verdacht bezüglich einer bestimmten Straftat besteht und dass Beweise für diese Straftat am zu durchsuchenden Ort gefunden werden (das heißt in einem bestimmten elektronischen Konto wie einem E-Mail-Account). Dieser Rechtsstandard muss durch konkrete und vertrauenswürdige Fakten belegt werden. Jeder Durchsuchungsbeschluss muss diese strenge Prüfung des hinreichenden Verdachts anhand glaubwürdiger Fakten, Spezifität und Rechtmäßigkeit bestehen, muss von einem unabhängigen Richter genehmigt werden und muss die Anforderungen hinsichtlich Umfang und Zuständigkeit erfüllen. Im Mai 2023 hat das DOJ außerdem eine Richtlinie erlassen, wonach Staatsanwälte, die nachweislich im Ausland gespeicherte Beweismittel anfordern, vor Erhalt einer entsprechenden Anordnung die Genehmigung des Office of International Affairs (OIA) des Ministeriums einholen müssen. Die DOJ-Richtlinie zu Beweismitteln im Ausland weist darauf hin, dass jede Nation Gesetze zum Schutz ihrer Souveränität erlässt; das OIA arbeitet daran, diesbezügliche Fragen zu klären und Staatsanwälte bei der Auswahl eines geeigneten Mechanismus zur Sicherung von Beweismitteln zu unterstützen.
Fakt 2: AWS hat seit Beginn der statistischen Erfassung keine Kundeninhalte von Unternehmens- oder Regierungskundendaten aufgrund des CLOUD Act offengelegt
AWS verfügt über strenge Verfahren zur Bearbeitung von Anfragen von Strafverfolgungsbehörden aus allen Ländern, um deren Legitimität zu prüfen und sicherzustellen, dass sie geltendem Recht entsprechen. AWS erkennt die legitimen Bedürfnisse von Strafverfolgungsbehörden bei der Untersuchung krimineller und terroristischer Aktivitäten an, aber diese müssen die rechtlichen Schutzmaßnahmen für solche Ermittlungen beachten. Wir geben Kundendaten auf keinerlei behördliche Anfragen heraus, es sei denn, wir sind dazu durch eine rechtlich gültige und verbindliche Anordnung verpflichtet. Dies haben wir in unseren rechtlichen Bedingungen öffentlich zugesichert. Darüber hinaus werden wir behördliche Anfragen anfechten, die gegen das Gesetz verstoßen, zu weitreichend oder anderweitig unangemessen sind (beispielsweise, wenn eine solche Anfrage die Grundrechte von Personen verletzen würde). Wenn wir solche Anfragen nach Inhalten von Unternehmenskunden erhalten, unternehmen wir alle angemessenen Anstrengungen, um Strafverfolgungsbehörden an den Kunden zu verweisen und den Kunden zu benachrichtigen, wenn dies rechtlich zulässig ist. Wenn wir zur Offenlegung von Kundeninhalten verpflichtet sind, benachrichtigen wir die Kunden vor der Offenlegung, um ihnen die Möglichkeit zu geben, sich gegen die Offenlegung zu schützen, sofern dies nicht gesetzlich untersagt ist. Wenn AWS nach Ausschöpfung dieser Schritte weiterhin zur Offenlegung von Kundendaten verpflichtet ist und wir die technische Möglichkeit dazu haben (was, wie oben beschrieben, in vielen Fällen nicht der Fall ist), legen wir nur das zur Erfüllung des rechtlichen Verfahrens unbedingt Notwendige offen.
In Übereinstimmung mit unserer Richtlinie, Strafverfolgungsbehörden an die Kunden zu verweisen, hat auch die Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section des DOJ Leitlinien herausgegeben, die Staatsanwälte anweisen, Daten grundsätzlich direkt von einem Unternehmen anzufordern, wie beispielsweise von einem Unternehmen, das Daten bei einem Cloud-Anbieter speichert, und nicht vom Anbieter selbst.
Ein deutlicher Beleg für die Wirksamkeit unserer Maßnahmen und der strengen gesetzlichen Anforderungen ist die Tatsache, dass AWS seit Beginn der statistischen Erfassung im Jahr 2020 keine außerhalb der USA gespeicherten Kundeninhalte von Unternehmens- oder Regierungskundendaten an die US-Regierung weitergegeben hat. Diese Bilanz spiegelt die technischen Schutzmaßnahmen von AWS, die robusten rechtlichen Schutzmaßnahmen im US-Recht, die vom DOJ umgesetzten Richtlinien und die Art der strafrechtlichen Ermittlungen wider, die sich hauptsächlich auf die Sammlung elektronischer Beweise aus Verbraucherkonten konzentrieren.
Fakt 3: Der CLOUD Act gilt nicht nur für Unternehmen mit Hauptsitz in den USA – er gilt für alle Anbieter, die Geschäfte in den Vereinigten Staaten tätigen
Der CLOUD Act gilt für alle Anbieter von elektronischen Kommunikationsdiensten oder Remote-Computing-Diensten, die in den USA tätig sind oder dort eine rechtliche Präsenz haben – unabhängig vom Standort ihres Hauptsitzes. Beispielsweise unterliegen auch Cloud-Anbieter mit Hauptsitz in Europa, die Geschäfte in den USA tätigen, den Anforderungen des Gesetzes. OVHcloud, ein Cloud-Service-Anbieter mit Hauptsitz in Frankreich, der in den USA tätig ist, vermerkt auf seiner CLOUD Act FAQ-Seite, dass “OVHcloud rechtmäßigen Anfragen von Behörden nachkommen wird. Im Rahmen des CLOUD Act könnte dies auch Daten einschließen, die außerhalb der Vereinigten Staaten gespeichert sind.” Ähnlich verhält es sich mit anderen Cloud-Anbietern mit Hauptsitz in der EU und anderswo, die ebenfalls in den USA tätig sind.
Fakt 4: Die Grundsätze des CLOUD Act stehen im Einklang mit internationalem Recht und den Gesetzen anderer Länder
Der CLOUD Act hat keine neue Rechtsposition bezüglich des Umfangs elektronischer Daten eingeführt, die im Rahmen legitimer strafrechtlicher Ermittlungen offengelegt werden müssen. Viele Länder verlangen die Offenlegung von Kundendaten, unabhängig vom Speicherort, als Reaktion auf rechtliche Verfahren im Zusammenhang mit schweren Straftaten. Der britische Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act beispielsweise ermöglicht es britischen Strafverfolgungsbehörden, im Zusammenhang mit strafrechtlichen Ermittlungen auf außerhalb des Vereinigten Königreichs gespeicherte elektronische Daten zuzugreifen. Laut einer Einreichung des US-DOJ von 2024 haben mehrere EU-Mitgliedstaaten, darunter Belgien, Dänemark, Frankreich, Irland und Spanien, ähnliche Anforderungen. Tatsächlich kommt seit 2023 die Mehrheit der Strafverfolgungsanfragen, die AWS erhält, von Behörden außerhalb der Vereinigten Staaten.
Dieses Konzept ist auch in der Budapest-Konvention zur Cyberkriminalität verankert, dem ersten internationalen Vertrag zur Verbesserung der Zusammenarbeit bei der Untersuchung von Cyberkriminalität. Darüber hinaus ermächtigt die EU-Verordnung e-Evidence, 2023/1543, die im August 2023 verabschiedet wurde, die Mitgliedstaaten dazu, “einen Dienstanbieter anzuweisen, elektronische Beweismittel unabhängig vom Standort der Daten zu erstellen oder zu sichern”. Die DSGVO erlaubt ebenfalls die Übermittlung personenbezogener Daten als Reaktion auf verpflichtende Offenlegungsanfragen aus Drittländern – vorausgesetzt, die betreffende Partei kann sich auf eine geeignete Rechtsgrundlage und ein Übertragungsinstrument oder eine Ausnahmeregelung berufen (siehe die aktuellen EDSA Leitlinien 02/2024 zu Artikel 48).
AWS setzt sich dafür ein, dass Regierungen gegenseitige Vollzugsvereinbarungen im Rahmen des CLOUD Act abschließen, einschließlich zwischen den USA und der Europäischen Union sowie den USA und Kanada. Wir glauben, dass diese Vereinbarungen wichtig sind, um potenzielle Gesetzeskonflikte endgültig zu lösen und eine effektive Untersuchung schwerer Straftaten zur Förderung der öffentlichen Sicherheit zu ermöglichen. Dabei werden die bereits bestehenden starken materiell- und verfahrensrechtlichen Schutzmaßnahmen nach US-Recht anerkannt.
Fakt 5: Der CLOUD Act beschränkt nicht die technischen Maßnahmen und operativen Kontrollen, die AWS seinen Kunden zum Schutz vor unbefugtem Zugriff auf Kundendaten anbietet
Wir können auf rechtliche Datenanfragen nur dann reagieren, wenn wir die technische Möglichkeit dazu haben. AWS verfügt über eine Reihe von Produkten und Services, die sicherstellen, dass niemand – nicht einmal Mitarbeiter:innen von AWS – auf Kundeninhalte zugreifen können. AWS Kunden verfügen auch über eine Reihe zusätzlicher technischer Maßnahmen und operativer Kontrollen, um den Zugriff auf Daten zu verhindern. Beispielsweise sind viele der AWS Kernsysteme und Services mit Zero-Operator-Zugriff konzipiert, was bedeutet, dass die Services keine technischen Möglichkeiten für AWS Mitarbeiter:innen bieten, auf Kundendaten als Reaktion auf eine rechtliche Anfrage zuzugreifen.
Das AWS Nitro System, das die Grundlage der AWS Rechendienstleistungen bildet, verwendet spezialisierte Hardware und Software, um Daten während der Verarbeitung auf Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) vor externem Zugriff zu schützen. Durch eine starke physische und logische Sicherheitsgrenze ist Nitro so konzipiert, dass keine unbefugte Person – nicht einmal AWS Mitarbeiter:innen – auf Workloads von Kunden auf EC2 zugreifen kann. Das Design des Nitro Systems wurde von der NCC Group, einem unabhängigen Cybersicherheitsunternehmen, validiert. Die Kontrollen, die den Betreiberzugriff verhindern, sind für das Nitro System so grundlegend, dass wir sie in unsere AWS Servicebedingungen aufgenommen haben, um allen unseren Kunden eine zusätzliche vertragliche Zusicherung zu geben.
Wir bieten Kunden auch Funktionen und Kontrollen zur Verschlüsselung von Daten, sei es während der Übertragung, im Ruhezustand oder im Arbeitsspeicher. Alle AWS Services unterstützen bereits Verschlüsselung, wobei die meisten auch die Verschlüsselung mit kundenverwalteten Schlüsseln unterstützen, die für AWS nicht zugänglich sind. Der AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) ist das erste hochskalierbare, Cloud-native Schlüsselverwaltungssystem mit FIPS 140-3 Level 3-Zertifizierung. Vereinfacht ausgedrückt bedeutet dies, dass AWS eine äußerst starke Verschlüsselung anbietet, bei der unsere Kunden kontrollieren, wer einen Schlüssel erhält.
Fortsetzung unserer Kundenorientierung
Bei AWS bestimmt unser kundenorientierter Ansatz alles, was wir tun – von der Gestaltung unserer Services bis zum Schutz Ihrer Daten. Wir verstehen, dass Ihr Vertrauen durch Transparenz, starke technische Kontrollen und unermüdlichen Einsatz für Ihre Interessen verdient wird. Deshalb haben wir klar kommuniziert, wie wir mit behördlichen Datenanfragen umgehen, einschließlich der Auswirkungen des CLOUD Act, und der mehrschichtigen Schutzmaßnahmen – rechtlich, operativ und technisch – zum Schutz Ihrer Daten.
Wir ermutigen Sie, mehr über dieses wichtige Thema zu in unseren erweiterten CLOUD Act FAQs zu lesen. Wir werden weiterhin in Ihrem Interesse innovativ sein, neue Funktionen und Services entwickeln, die Ihnen die Kontrolle über Ihre Daten geben, und unser Engagement für höchste Datenschutz- und Sicherheitsstandards aufrechterhalten.
Über den Autor
Bob Kimball ist Chief Regulatory Officer und ehemaliger General Counsel bei AWS. In seiner aktuellen Position ist Bob ein AWS-Experte für globale regulatorische Fragen und arbeitet eng mit Aufsichtsbehörden und Kunden zu Themen wie KI, digitale Souveränität, Energie und anderen Schlüsselthemen zusammen, die den Betrieb von Cloud-Infrastruktur und -Services betreffen.
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What is CCAG?
The CCAG is a not-for-profit association representing a growing number of regulated financial services institutions across Europe. Its mission is to execute pooled audits of cloud service providers, enabling participating institutions to exercise their audit rights in alignment with supervisory expectations, including those set out by the European Banking Authority (EBA).
The CCAG audit methodology is grounded in recognized international standards and frameworks, including:
While there are many established security frameworks, CCAG uses the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix to assess the control environment of cloud service providers. This framework provides foundational security principles tailored to cloud environments and enables risk-informed assurance in regulated industries.
Between February and December 2024, AWS collaborated with CCAG member auditors through a structured, multi-phase audit program. Fieldwork activities were conducted entirely on site across two AWS locations in Europe and North America. The scope of the audit covered selected AWS services and corresponding enterprise-wide controls, aligned to the expectations of European financial regulators.
As part of the audit, CCAG evaluated the ability of AWS to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and sovereignty of customer data across AWS Regions; to detect and respond effectively to security incidents and make sure of forensic readiness; to enforce strict access controls and manage privileged users with precision; and to maintain operational resilience through structured change and configuration management processes. Further areas of assessment included the security of APIs and customer-facing interfaces, the ability to support interoperability and data portability, the governance of supplier relationships and workforce lifecycle management, and the enforcement of centralized policy, risk, and compliance oversight across the AWS environment.
CCAG 2024: A collaborative milestone in assurance
The 2024 engagement exemplified strong alignment between CCAG’s audit strategy and the commitment of AWS to assurance. Through effective governance structures, shared timelines, and continuous dialogue, AWS supported the audit with clarity, responsiveness, and precision.
“CCAG proudly acknowledges the exceptional collaboration with AWS in delivering a strategically significant and highly complex audit. This engagement brought together CCAG’s deep-rooted expertise in banking and financial services—including decades of regulatory insight, audit precision, and sector-specific resilience knowledge—with AWS’s outstanding technical leadership, operational agility, and commitment to transparency.
This partnership exemplified the highest standards of professional alignment, mutual accountability, and excellence. The shared focus on rigor and process integrity enabled CCAG to conduct a risk-informed, regulatory-grade audit within agreed timelines—reinforcing what best-in-class assurance in cloud-enabled financial services can look like.” Audit Coordinators of the CCAG Group
“CCAG proudly acknowledges the exceptional collaboration with AWS in delivering a strategically significant and highly complex audit. This engagement brought together CCAG’s deep-rooted expertise in banking and financial services—including decades of regulatory insight, audit precision, and sector-specific resilience knowledge—with AWS’s outstanding technical leadership, operational agility, and commitment to transparency.
This partnership exemplified the highest standards of professional alignment, mutual accountability, and excellence. The shared focus on rigor and process integrity enabled CCAG to conduct a risk-informed, regulatory-grade audit within agreed timelines—reinforcing what best-in-class assurance in cloud-enabled financial services can look like.” — Audit Coordinators of the CCAG Group
Looking ahead
Following the successful completion of the 2024 cycle, AWS has already initiated the 2025 CCAG engagement. We remain committed to strengthening trust, improving transparency, and continuing to collaborate with customers and regulators to support the secure and compliance-aligned adoption of cloud services across the financial sector.
To learn more about AWS compliance programs, visit AWS Compliance Programs. For audit-specific inquiries, reach out to your AWS account team or contact the Security Assurance team.
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We are pleased to announce the successful completion of a comprehensive privacy audit conducted by Ernst & Young (EY) Netherlands on behalf of the Netherlands Ministry of Justice and Security. This customer audit examined the data protection measures implemented by AWS for a limited number of internal AWS operations when AWS is processing personal data as a data controller (referred to as “Legitimate Business Operations” in the audit report).
This audit is the first major assessment focusing on the role of AWS as a data controller, examining how we protect customers’ personal data beyond customer content. The audit specifically addressed the Dutch government’s need to make sure that personal data is processed strictly according to Dutch government organizations’ instructions when used for Legitimate Business Operations of AWS.
Beginning in January 2025, EY Netherlands conducted thorough fieldwork to evaluate the compliance of AWS with our contractual commitments. The audit report was finalized on June 16, 2025, and made publicly available on July 16, 2025, on Strategic Vendor Management for Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS (SLM) website, the team in the Ministry that manages the national agreements between the Dutch government and cloud service providers. The audit report provides insight into our data protection practices and demonstrates the commitment of AWS to data protection and privacy when acting as a data controller.
We remain committed to maintaining the highest standards of data protection and privacy for our customers. This successful audit reinforces our dedication to transparency and compliance with stringent data protection requirements.
For more information about AWS privacy and data protection practices, visit our Data Privacy Center, the EU data protection section of the AWS Cloud Security website, or contact your AWS account team. To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs of the AWS Cloud Security website. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that the Spring 2025 System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3 reports are now available. The reports cover 184 services over the 12-month period from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, giving customers a full year of assurance. The reports demonstrate our continuous commitment to adhering to the heightened expectations for cloud service providers.
AWS strives to continuously bring services into the scope of its compliance programs to help customers meet their architectural and regulatory needs. You can view the current list of services in scope on our Services in Scope page. You can also reach out to your AWS account team if you have any questions or feedback about SOC compliance.
To learn more about AWS compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.
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Last month, we announced new sovereign controls and governance structure for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a new, independent cloud for Europe, designed to help customers meet their evolving sovereignty needs, including stringent data residency, operational autonomy, and resiliency requirements. Launching by the end of 2025, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be entirely located within the European Union (EU) and operate as an independent cloud for Europe. Last month, we announced plans to launch a dedicated European certificate authority (CA), or trust service provider, to support autonomous trust service operations within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
We are actively building out the first AWS Region of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in the state of Brandenburg, Germany. We are on track for launch and AWS services are being deployed, configured, and tested for autonomous operations in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud infrastructure will be physically and logically separate from other Regions. We designed the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to have no critical dependencies on non-EU infrastructure. Everything needed to operate the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is in the EU: the talent, the technology, the infrastructure, and the leadership. In addition to independent infrastructure, there will be zero operational control outside of EU borders. Only AWS employees, residing in the EU, will control day-to-day operations, including access to data centers, technical support, and customer service for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
For the first time, we will provide a dedicated sovereign European trust service provider (EU-TSP). This EU-TSP will autonomously operate its own CA key materials and perform certificate issuance functions within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. A trust service provider is an entity that manages the policies and operations for a set of root and subordinate certificate authorities. A root CA is a cryptographic building block and root of trust upon which end entity certificates can be issued. It represents a private key for signing (issuing) certificates and a root certificate that identifies the root CA and binds the private key to the name of the CA. In short, the EU-TSP is an autonomous trust service provider in Europe, for Europe.
The EU-TSP will be the public root of trust for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, helping to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of network communications. The EU-TSP will provide the default CA used by AWS service endpoints, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and ACM integrated services. For AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers, this means that even in the event of a material loss of connectivity outside of the EU, the EU-TSP will continue to provide trust services autonomously.
We recently completed the cryptographic key signing ceremony for our EU-TSP at a secure EU location, witnessed by external, third-party auditors. The resulting root CAs have been submitted for inclusion to popular web browsers used by AWS customers. This EU-TSP will be operated in accordance with the requirements of the Certificate Authority/Browser Forum. All the key material for the EU-TSP is located within EU borders, and only EU residents have the ability to operate, control, or reconfigure the EU-TSP.
To maintain verifiable trust, we will engage independent EU-based auditors to assure the EU-TSP controls are designed appropriately, operate effectively, and can help customers satisfy their compliance obligations. We will make the audit reports publicly available.
The EU-TSP will be active and providing autonomous trust services when the AWS European Sovereign Cloud launches at the end of 2025. To learn more, visit AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that three new AWS services have been added to the scope of our Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) certification:
This certification means that customers can use these services while maintaining PCI DSS compliance, enabling innovation without compromising security. The full list of services can be found on the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. The PCI DSS compliance package includes two key components:
Attestation of Compliance (AOC) – demonstrates that AWS was successfully validated against the PCI DSS standard.
AWS Responsibility Summary – provides guidance to help AWS customers understand their responsibility in developing and operating a highly secure environment on AWS for handling payment card data.
AWS was evaluated by Coalfire, a third-party Qualified Security Assessor (QSA).
This refreshed certification offers customers greater flexibility in deploying regulated workloads while reducing compliance overhead. Customers can access the PCI DSS reports through AWS Artifact. This self-service portal provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports, streamlining audit processes.
To learn more about our PCI programs and other compliance and security programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs page. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Compliance Support page.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
We’re excited to announce that AWS has completed the CyberVadis assessment of its security posture with the highest score (Mature) in all assessed areas. This demonstrates our continued commitment to meet the heightened expectations for cloud service providers. Customers can now use the 2025 AWS CyberVadis report and scorecard to reduce their supplier due-diligence burden.
With the increasing adoption of cloud products and services across multiple sectors and industries, AWS is a critical component of customers’ third-party environments. Regulated customers, such as those in the financial services sector, are held to high standards by regulators and auditors when it comes to exercising effective due diligence on third parties.
Many customers use third-party risk management services such as CyberVadis to better manage risks from their evolving third-party environments and drive operational efficiencies. In support of these efforts, AWS has completed its annual CyberVadis security posture assessment, conducted by CyberVadis security analysts.
CyberVadis is a comprehensive third-party risk assessment process that combines the speed and scalability of automation with the certainty of analyst validation. CyberVadis assessments employ a dynamic and comprehensive approach to third-party risk assessment, replacing outdated static spreadsheets and the need for annual AWS assessment access requests. This cloud-based solution provides advanced capabilities by integrating AWS responses with analytics and sophisticated risk models to deliver an in-depth view of the security posture of AWS.
CyberVadis’s risk assessment methodology evaluates 20 topics covering the entire cybersecurity life cycle across four phases: Identify, Protect, Detect, and React. These topics include Data Privacy, Access Management, and Infrastructure Security. The assessment criteria are based on international information security standards, including ISO 2700x, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, Cybersecurity for ICS, PCI DSS, NIS2 and GDPR.
Customers can use CyberVadis results to map the assessment of AWS to commonly used industry frameworks and standards to instantly gain visibility into controls coverage.
AWS customers can download the complete 2025 AWS Assessment Report directly through CyberVadis’s portal using their own account, or through AWS Artifact.
We value your feedback and questions. Reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page. If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. To learn more about our other compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, achieving the highest ranking in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories.
The Forrester Wave evaluation provides business leaders with rigorous, fact-based analysis for technology purchasing decisions. Through transparent criteria spanning current offering, strategy, and customer feedback, Forrester evaluates vendors to identify Leaders, Strong Performers, and Contenders. The AWS serverless portfolio unifies traditional and AI-driven development, enabling teams to build intelligent, adaptive systems with minimal infrastructure and code overhead. The evaluation analyzed across key services, including AWS Lambda for serverless compute, AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge for application integration, and AWS Fargate with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for serverless containers.
Serverless beyond function-as-a-service
The serverless operating model has evolved beyond function-as-a-service approaches. It has become a comprehensive cloud-based software development model that abstracts away underlying cloud infrastructure, complex server configurations, runtime characteristics, and deployment patterns from the development process. Forrester defines key characteristics of serverless development platforms as supporting the deployment of arbitrary business logic, decoupled state from the underlying compute, autonomous scale by demand (often back to zero), flexible consumption-based billing, abstraction of the underlying cloud infrastructure, and event-driven communication.
According to the Forrester report, “AWS provides a mature foundation for event-driven application development with extensive integrations across the AWS ecosystem. AWS continues to evolve its serverless portfolio for market demands including the growing influence of AI workloads. AWS’s platform completeness and integration depth are notable, making it well-suited for organizations seeking to build production-grade event-driven applications at scale with granularity and control.”
AWS capabilities recognized in the report
AWS’s recognition as a Leader in this report underscores, for us, our commitment to providing best-in-class innovation and developer experiences in serverless application development. Findings from AWS’s vendor profile in the report include:
Strategy – AWS has a clear and cohesive vision that aligns serverless capabilities across its expansive cloud portfolio. Its innovation strategy is tightly coupled with customer feedback and reinforced through sustained R&D investment.
Capabilities – AWS offers strong capabilities across developer experiences, tools, and service integrations. Developers benefit from mature software development kits (SDKs), command line interface (CLI) tools, and infrastructure as code (IaC) options. Its APIs and event-driven integrations are among the best, enabling complex, scalable architectures and workflows.
Evolving serverless developer experience on AWS
AWS has made significant investments to streamline the developer onboarding experience through comprehensive resources and tools. As generative AI infuses every step of software development and transforms the technology landscape, organizations must adapt quickly to maintain their competitive edge. Many are building distributed architectures that use specific large language models (LLMs) based on unique requirements, and the serverless operating model is ideal for these AI-powered applications. Serverless enables organizations to start small and scale seamlessly while handling distributed, event-driven workflows securely at scale.
The newly launched AWS Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides AI-powered, contextual guidance throughout the serverless development lifecycle, so developers can receive real-time assistance with service selection, best practices, and implementation patterns while building applications with Lambda. The developer-first approach also includes the Amazon Q Developer plugin for AI-assisted development (including code generation, debugging, and architectural guidance), enhanced AWS SAM CLI capabilities for improved local testing and debugging, the integration with Serverless Land for direct blueprint access on the Lambda console, extensive documentation with practical examples, interactive tutorials, and integration with familiar development environments. AWS has also enhanced the getting started experience through simplified deployment workflows, IaC templates, and automated best practices enforcement. Furthermore, the broad ecosystem of AWS partners, developer advocates, and community contributors provides additional support through workshops, sample applications, and reference architectures. These comprehensive improvements demonstrate our commitment to accelerating serverless adoption by making development more intuitive, efficient, and accessible for teams at any stage of their cloud journey.
Conclusion
AWS has been recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, receiving top scores in Current Offering and Strategy categories, which, in our opinion, underscores our commitment to innovation and excellence in serverless computing. As the serverless landscape continues to evolve, AWS remains at the forefront, providing a comprehensive suite of services that enable developers to build scalable, efficient, and intelligent applications.As we look to the future, AWS will continue to invest in serverless technologies, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud computing. Whether you’re building AI-powered applications, modernizing legacy systems, or creating entirely new digital experiences, AWS serverless offerings provide the agility, scalability, and innovation you need to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Read the full report to learn why Forrester positioned AWS as a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .
We continue to expand the scope of our assurance programs at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are pleased to announce that 122 services are now certified as adherent to the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) Data Protection Code of Conduct. This alignment with the CISPE requirements demonstrates our ongoing commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for data protection by cloud service providers. AWS customers who use AWS certified services can be confident that their data is processed in adherence with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The CISPE Code of Conduct is the first pan-European, sector-specific code for cloud infrastructure service providers and received a favorable opinion that it complies with the GDPR. It helps organizations across Europe accelerate the development of GDPR-aligned, cloud-based services for consumers, businesses, and institutions.
The accredited monitoring body EY CertifyPoint evaluated AWS as of May 19, 2025, and successfully audited 112 certified services. AWS added ten additional services to the current scope in May 2025. As of the date of this post, 122 services are in scope of this certification. The Certificate of Compliance that illustrates AWS compliance status is available on the CISPE Public Register. For up-to-date information, including when additional services are added, search the CISPE Public Register by entering AWS as the Seller of Record; or see the AWS CISPE Data Protection Code of Conduct page.
AWS strives to bring additional services into the scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. If you have questions or feedback about AWS compliance with CISPE Code, reach out to your AWS account team.
AWS announced that Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) has achieved Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3 Level 1 validation of our cryptographic modules, marking a significant milestone in our commitment to providing secure, compliant operating system options for regulated workloads. FIPS certified modules are particularly important for US and Canadian government workloads, healthcare applications requiring HIPAA compliance, financial services, defense contractors, and other regulated industries. FIPS 140-3, which supersedes FIPS 140-2, represents the latest government security standard for cryptographic modules, jointly validated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) through the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP). The validation follows the rigorous requirements outlined in the FIPS 140-3 standard and encompasses critical cryptographic modules including the OpenSSL, Linux Kernel Cryptographic API, NSS, GnuTLS, and Libgcrypt.
These modules have been extensively tested to have robust security capabilities such as approved cryptographic algorithms, secure key management, strong entropy generation, and protected memory boundaries. The validation process was conducted by a NIST-accredited lab, and further reviewed by the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP). Additionally, the certificate details can be verified on the CMVP Active Validation List.
When I began my career in security, most people accepted as fact that protecting systems came at the expense of productivity. That didn’t have to be true then, and it’s definitely not true now. The cloud, and specifically the AWS Cloud, is a big reason why. But as technology evolves and systems become more complex, operating at scale demands a fresh approach to security. We take our customers’ security seriously, and that means building guardrails that give organizations the confidence to innovate boldly and scale rapidly.
In my new role as AWS CISO, I see this playing out daily. As I meet with customers, their excitement about technologies like generative AI comes hand in hand with questions about securing complex environments and managing new types of risk. They’re excited about innovation, but they need confidence that their security foundations can keep pace with their ambitions. They want to move fast without compromising security.
Today at re:Inforce, I shared how AWS is working backward from these needs to fundamentally transform how security scales in the cloud. It all starts with a security foundation built on four key pillars: identity and access management, data and network security, monitoring and incident response, and the continuous work of migration, modernization, and patching. Organizations with mature security models across these pillars are the ones moving fastest. Across each of these areas, we’re focused on delivering security capabilities that help customers adopt new technologies and experiment with confidence.
Scaling identity for the cloud
As our customers rapidly scale their cloud operations, they’ve told us that managing identity and access across complex environments becomes increasingly challenging. They need solutions that can grow with their business while maintaining strong security. Identity and access management underpins every aspect of cloud security, and success in this area requires both rigorous authentication controls and comprehensive visibility into access permissions.
I was excited to announce new internal access findings for AWS IAM Access Analyzer today. This capability transforms how organizations manage access to sensitive data at scale, addressing the complexities our customers face as they grow. Using automated reasoning technology, it analyzes complex permission layers across diverse policy types, giving security teams comprehensive visibility into who within their organizations has access to what resources. With daily monitoring and notifications of new access granted, we’re helping teams implement least-privilege access with confidence in even the most complex environments. This provides our customers visibility to strengthen access controls on their critical resources while maintaining the agility their business demands as they scale in the cloud.
Empowering transformation through data and network security
Our customers are eager to transform their businesses, but they need confidence that their security can keep pace with rapid innovation. This is especially true when it comes to protecting their networks and data at scale. During the keynote, Noopur Davis, CISO of Comcast, shared how her organization protects their vast network and customer data while enabling rapid innovation. With millions of customers relying on their services, Comcast’s approach resonated with me: security shouldn’t just defend, it should enable transformation.
We’re delivering on this vision with new capabilities that simplify security at scale. Today, I announced that AWS Certificate Manager now allows you to export ACM-issued public certificates and their private keys for use inside or outside of AWS, giving you automated certificate management with the flexibility to help secure your workloads. We’re also expanding AWS Shield with enhanced network and application protection that performs a network security analysis to identify configuration issues and provides remediation recommendations. You can even use AWS generative AI powered assistant Amazon Q Developer to gain actionable insights using simple natural language. These innovations help teams protect their data and stay ahead of evolving threats even as their environments grow more complex.
Elevating threat detection and response
Our customers have shared their challenges in keeping pace with the evolving threat landscape, especially as they scale their cloud operations. While traditional automation helps manage growing complexity, AI represents an even more powerful opportunity to transform security operations. When implemented thoughtfully, AI dramatically improves our ability to spot complex attack patterns, reduce false positives, and automate responses at massive scale.
Today at re:Inforce, I announced two key security innovations: expanded capabilities in Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection and enhanced AWS Security Hub that directly address these needs. Together, these services help simplify security at scale. GuardDuty uses AWS-trained AI and machine learning (AI/ML) models to detect sophisticated multi-stage threats and provide actionable insights, while Security Hub prioritizes critical security issues by automatically analyzing and correlating security signals into clear, prioritized actions. This approach gives teams the confidence to scale their operations, knowing they can detect and respond to security risks efficiently across their entire AWS environment.
Accelerating the journey to better security
While advanced capabilities like AI and automation help strengthen security operations, the foundation matters most. Moving to the cloud represents a transformative opportunity to build on a fundamentally stronger security foundation than most organizations can ever hope to achieve with on-premises environments. When migrating to AWS, you reduce the need to manage physical infrastructure security while gaining access to built-in protections that are continuously updated and maintained.
Successful cloud adoption means going beyond simple lift-and-shift. Modernization is key to realizing these benefits. By moving solutions further up the stack to use managed services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), you benefit from security controls that are built in rather than bolted on. These services are continuously patched and maintained by AWS, freeing your teams to focus on innovating for your customers. After all, the fastest path to better security is the one where core protections are already built in.
Partnering for security success
Security transformation isn’t a journey organizations need to take alone. Throughout my career, I’ve seen how the right partnerships can accelerate success, bringing fresh perspectives and deep expertise to complex challenges. Our security partners help customers across the four pillars we discussed today, from implementing identity solutions to modernizing security operations. They understand both the technical complexities and the business realities of scaling security in the cloud, often bringing valuable industry-specific experience that helps organizations move faster with confidence.
Looking ahead
As you scale your operations in the cloud, our goal is to give you the confidence to move quickly while maintaining strong security controls. When security scales naturally with your business, teams can focus on building what’s next instead of managing infrastructure.
To dive deeper into how AWS designs, builds, and operates security at unprecedented scale, I encourage you to join our Innovation Talks at re:Inforce. These hour-long sessions explore the key pillars of modern cloud security: secure foundations, resilient architectures, AI-powered innovations, and large-scale threat intelligence.
As I step into my role as AWS CISO, I’m energized by the opportunity ahead. For nearly 20 years, AWS has maintained a unique culture of security that enables us to innovate rapidly while shipping securely. As we navigate the landscape of generative AI and rapid technological change, earning your trust means not just keeping pace with innovation, but helping to make it even more successful. I couldn’t be more excited to carry this mission forward.
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At AWS, security is the top priority, and today we’re excited to share work we’ve been doing towards our goal to make AWS the safest place to run any workload. In earlier posts on this blog, we shared details of our internal active defense systems, like MadPot (global honeypots), Mithra (domain graph neural network), and Sonaris (network mitigations). We’re still inventing new ways to improve the effectiveness of threat intelligence and automated response to detect and help prevent attacks. Today we’ll share advancements in active defense related to malware, software vulnerabilities, and AWS resource misconfigurations. Like the other posts we linked to, these are constantly improving capabilities that our customers get just for being on the AWS network. We’ll discuss these topics in more depth at re:inforce 2025 during Innovation Talk SEC302.
Stopping malware from spreading
Financially motivated threat actors try to gain access to a wide array of networked assets. The more resources they control, the more places they can hide, and the longer they can profit from their abusive operations. As such, threat actor malware often contains modules to scan for new targets, replicate binaries over the network, and then repeat. If left unchecked, such rapidly spreading behavior can lead to network congestion, service availability loss, and data destruction. We want to help prevent this behavior to the greatest degree possible.
One effective strategy we employ is identifying the threat actor’s key infrastructure where malware is centrally controlled. We use a variety of techniques to identify, verify, track, and disrupt threat infrastructure. Using network traffic logs, honeypot interactions, and malware samples from an array of sensor positions, we mitigate botnets, abusive proxies, and peer-to-peer malware. Over the past 12 months, AWS helped prevent over 4 million malware infection attempts across 315 thousand distinct Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. By protecting workloads from these malware infections, we not only protect our network and our customers, but also the broader internet from further malware expansion.
Advancements in threat hunting and mitigating software vulnerabilities
At Amazon, we’re proud to support software vulnerability research with programs for bug bounty, vulnerability disclosure, and open source contribution. We’ve also become a more active participant in the CVE process by becoming a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for the software and services provided by Amazon. Thanks to the public CVE database, we see vulnerability research accelerating as reported CVEs have grown by 21 percent year-over-year since 2013, with over 40 thousand CVEs published in 2024. This virtuous cycle of finding and resolving vulnerabilities improves cyber security over time, but AWS sees threat actors searching for unresolved vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to resources.
We’ve expanded MadPot and Sonaris to identify and stop a broader range of malicious vulnerability scanning and exploitation activity, protecting every AWS customer from vulnerability exposure. We’ve added hundreds of new detections and MadPot service emulations to identify real attacks. As we’ve expanded our visibility, we’ve continued blocking hundreds of millions of CVE exploit attempts daily across the AWS network.
As we’ve made these active defense systems better at stopping CVE exploit attacks, the total number of attacks has gone down by over 55 percent in the last 12 months, as shown in Figure 1. There are many factors outside our control in this observation, but we’re happy to see fewer CVE exploit attacks. This trend coincides with the detection, regionalization, latency, and guardrail improvements we’ve made in 2025. No system can block everything, so fewer exploit attempts mean less risk across a wide range of workloads.
Figure 1: Chart showing the decrease in global malicious vulnerability exploit attempts
This work to identify known exploits in the wild directly benefits users of vulnerability intelligence in Amazon Inspector, which provides an Amazon Inspector score for customers to prioritize where to spend security hardening resources. This includes the most recent date of observed exploitation attempts, the MITRE ATT&CK techniques associated with the exploit activity, and the industries targeted.
Protecting architectures built on AWS
AWS actively defends compute and network resources for our customers; we also defend the distinct AWS-native resources that customers rely on. AWS access key credentials are a critical resource that allow access to customer accounts. The AWS Identity and Access Management best practices share proven techniques for customers to keep their credentials from being abused. Through active defense, we do even more to help customers who haven’t yet adopted these best practices.
Each day, AWS helps prevent an average of 167 million malicious scanning connections seeking unintentionally exposed AWS access key pairs. In case access keys are discovered through other means, we’ve expanded our protection of customer-managed IAM credentials. When our threat intelligence analytics show that a customer-managed credential is known by a threat actor, we put mitigations in place to restrict access to highly privileged operations. We also send customized notifications to help customers identify how the credential was exposed. These efforts are paying off for our customers every day; the following response is a good example of what we hear regularly:
This is a key that we already rotated a few weeks ago based on another alarm from you. It turned out that the new rotated key happened to be in your second alarm to us. So it meant that the app that the key was linked to was still leaking it.
So on Monday we sat down with the dev team, found where the app was leaking some secrets from, we patched it, I rotated all the exposed secrets (it was more than the IAM key) and we plugged in the extra security in the app.
So thanks again for those alerts, they are very precious. – AWS Customer
In a specific case of threat activity in November and December of 2024, customers reported ransomware activity against their objects in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage. We saw that these ransom threats were highly correlated with exposed customer-managed IAM keys. We applied quarantines to the exposed keys, taking care to make sure that normal customer operations could continue safely. We re-sent our proactive notifications to customers about keys that were likely exposed, because the risk of an attack was elevated. During this period, we worked together with customers to deactivate over 30 thousand exposed credentials. Since this threat activity began, AWS has helped prevent over 943 million malicious attempts to encrypt customer Amazon S3 objects.
These credential exposure detections flow into Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection, simplifying threat detection and response operations for modern cloud environments.
Better together
The approach AWS takes to active defense shows how security can be improved by layering protections across the infrastructure stack and using threat intelligence to drive risk reduction. By building active defense into our services at no extra cost, AWS helps our customers stay protected from a wide range of threats.
While we continue to constantly improve our protections for our customers, some of our work is by nature probabilistic, because we never see inside customer workloads. We don’t apply active defense in situations where the detection is ambiguous, because that might impact our customers’ production systems. To stay secure, customers should never let down their own defenses. AWS security services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Shield Advanced, AWS WAF, AWS Network Firewall, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Inspector provide prevention, detection, and response that customers can configure for their unique needs. The good news is that by working together, we’re making the internet safer for everyone.
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At this year’s AWS Summit in Washington, DC, I had the privilege of moderating a fireside chat with Steve Schmidt, Amazon’s Chief Security Officer, and Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. Our discussion explored how AI is transforming cybersecurity, threat response, and innovation across the public and private sectors. The conversation highlighted several key themes: how organizations can leverage AI to improve security outcomes, the rise of agentic AI and its impact on security, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI systems, workforce development strategies, and practical approaches to implementing AI securely in enterprise environments. Below are a few excerpts from our conversation.
On leveraging AI to improve security outcomes
Steve Schmidt: “We’ve applied AI internally at Amazon in a couple of places that led to some significant benefits, including in the application security review process. By training our large language models internally on prior security reviews that we’ve done, it has allowed us to apply the knowledge and learning that our more senior staff have embodied in the documents that the LLM was trained on and expose that to our more junior staff. It really raises the bar on the absolute level of security that we can offer.”
Lakshmi Raman: “In the cybersecurity realm, we’re thinking about how AI helps us in our accreditation and authorization process, helping us ensure that the process to get systems accredited is going as quickly as possible, because the industry is moving so fast. Another area that we’re applying AI and machine learning is triaging data. We have vast amounts of data that comes in at an exponential rate, so we need to be able to go through it quickly so that we can surface insights. You can imagine a cybersecurity analyst who traditionally has gone through network data manually in order to think about blocking suspicious IP addresses or connections. Now there’s an opportunity to do all of that really efficiently and let the security analysts make the decision.”
On the rise of agentic AI and its implications for security
Steve Schmidt: “The biggest change we’re seeing right now in AI is the rise of agentic AI. The reason agentic AI is particularly interesting is that it brings with it a set of challenges about ensuring the software is taking actions within the context of the person who’s asking it…Think about that in the context of a government organization, where you have sets of information that are restricted to certain populations, there are classification decisions, access control limitations, and reasons that you can access certain data that have to be present before you can do so. Agentic AI brings opportunities—you can take actions using software automatically—but also challenges: how do we make sure that the software is doing exactly the right thing every single time, and more importantly, that we can prove what it did to stakeholders and regulators?”
Lakshmi Raman: “AI agents definitely have an opportunity to transform enterprise automation. Leveraging them to do complex multi-step workflows—to do tool calling across a variety of databases and other foundational tools—has tremendous potential, with a human as a crucial step to review what’s going on.”
On the importance of maintaining human oversight with AI
Lakshmi Raman: “In my world, I spend a lot of time thinking about how AI is impacting the workforce. One of the areas we’re looking at is the intersection between AI and our people. AI is able to speed up the processing and do automation, but at the end of the day, it’s really about who is taking on the risk, or deciding the intents and making the decisions. Whatever the machine output happens to be, really it’s about the human who’s deciding the level of oversight, the risk to take, and even whether to intervene.”
Steve Schmidt: “One thing that many people don’t realize about AI systems is that they’re nondeterministic. What nondeterminism means is you can ask an AI model the same question 100 times, and you will not get the same answer every time. So, having a human who can make a judgment about what the AI comes up with is critically important. We look at it this way: if you’re just asking a question and getting an answer, that may be one set of scrutiny that you have to get assistance. But if you’re going to take an action, you’ve got to be really sure the AI is correct. There has to be that skilled person that Lakshmi spoke about, at the end of the AI use process saying, ‘Yes, this is the right thing to do at this point in time with this context.’”
On building an AI-savvy security workforce
Steve Schmidt: “There’s a real problem in our industry: we don’t have enough security people. We simply can’t hire enough people with the right skills to do this job. What we’ve we found is that AI allows us to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the security staff, using tooling that used to have to be done by humans. Our staff is actually materially happier with their jobs if we remove a lot of that grunt work from them, which is super important. You want to keep the employees you have, so you give them tooling that helps them get the job done more efficiently, and they enjoy their job.”
Lakshmi Raman: “We’re looking for people who can live between the intersection of technology and social intelligence, people who can understand how those two areas can potentially interact around human behavior and how to think about future activities. When we’re thinking about analysts, for example, we’re thinking about people who have critical thinking skills, who can demonstrate analytic rigor, who can think multiple steps ahead with incomplete information. We’re also looking for people who have digital acumen with an understanding of cloud and cyber and AI, so that we have those technical skills in house. And finally, people who are interested in lifelong learning and curiosity, because threats change over the years. We need people who understand and are willing to learn about that.”
On advice for security leaders as AI accelerates
Steve Schmidt: “When you’re looking at making a decision, ask the person who’s bringing the information to you: ‘Why can’t AI do this?’ And if they don’t have an answer, ask ‘When will it be able to and under what condition?’ Move it into the now, the probable, the possible, and make it real for all of your staff all the time. If they’re not intentionally making that decision, they’re missing an opportunity.”
Lakshmi Raman: “You’ve got to get training out there for your users. We think of it at three different levels. First is our general workforce—which might be the most important user base—people who are sitting side by side with our AI practitioners and can help describe the workflows that need automation. Then we think about it for our practitioners, so they are keeping up with the latest. And then finally, our senior executives, who can think about how they can transform their organization with AI and generate that buy-in from the top level.”
AI is not just changing what we can do, but how we work. As Steve and Lakshmi emphasized, the most successful AI implementations will be those that thoughtfully balance automation with human oversight, focusing on use cases that deliver tangible value while managing risks appropriately. For security professionals, understanding both the technical and human dimensions of AI will be critical as we navigate this changing space.
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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Tom Burns is a Senior Cloud Support Engineer at AWS and is based in the NYC area. He is a subject matter expert in Amazon OpenSearch Service and engages with customers for critical event troubleshooting and improving the supportability of the service. Outside of work, he enjoys playing with his cats, playing board games with friends, and playing competitive games online.
Ron Miller is a Solutions Architect based out of NYC, supporting transportation and logistics customers. Ron works closely with AWS’s Data & Analytics specialist organization to promote and support OpenSearch. On the weekend, Ron is a shade tree mechanic and trains to complete triathlons.
