Tag Archives: Public Sector

AWS completes the annual Dubai Electronic Security Centre certification audit to operate as a Tier 1 cloud service provider in the Emirate of Dubai

Post Syndicated from Vishal Pabari original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-completes-the-annual-dubai-electronic-security-centre-certification-audit-to-operate-as-a-tier-1-cloud-service-provider-in-the-emirate-of-dubai/

We’re excited to announce that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed the annual Dubai Electronic Security Centre (DESC) certification audit to operate as a Tier 1 cloud service provider (CSP) for the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region.

This alignment with DESC requirements demonstrates our continuous commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for CSPs. Government customers of AWS can run their applications in AWS Cloud-certified Regions with confidence.

The independent third-party auditor BSI evaluated AWS on behalf of DESC on January 23, 2024. The Certificate of Compliance that illustrates the compliance status of AWS is available through AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

The certification includes 25 additional services in scope, for a total of 87 services. This is a 40% increase in the number of services in the Middle East (UAE) Region that are in scope of the DESC CSP certification. For up-to-date information, including when additional services are added, see the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program webpage and choose DESC CSP.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into the scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. If you have questions or feedback about DESC compliance, reach out to your AWS account team.

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.

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Vishal Pabari

Vishal Pabari

Vishal is a Security Assurance Program Manager at AWS, based in London, UK. Vishal is responsible for third-party and customer audits, attestations, certifications, and assessments across EMEA. Vishal previously worked in risk and control, and technology in the financial services industry.

AWS Wickr achieves FedRAMP High authorization

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-wickr-achieves-fedramp-high-authorization/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that AWS Wickr has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization at the High impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB).

FedRAMP is a U.S. government–wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies.

Customers find security and control in Wickr

Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service with features designed to help keep your communications secure, private, and compliant. Wickr protects one-to-one and group messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and location sharing with 256-bit encryption, and provides data retention capabilities.

You can create Wickr networks through the AWS Management Console. Administrative controls allow your Wickr administrators to add, remove, and invite users, and organize them into security groups to manage messaging, calling, security, and federation settings. You maintain full control over data, which includes addressing information governance polices, configuring ephemeral messaging options, and deleting credentials for lost or stolen devices.

You can log internal and external communications—including conversations with guest users, contractors, and other partner networks—in a private data store that you manage. This allows you to retain messages and files that are sent to and from your organization, to help meet requirements such as those that fall under the Federal Records Act (FRA) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The FedRAMP milestone

In obtaining a FedRAMP High authorization, Wickr has been measured against a rigorous set of security controls, procedures, and policies established by the U.S. Federal Government, based on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

“For many federal agencies and organizations, having the ability to securely communicate and share information—whether in an office or out in the field—is key to helping achieve their critical missions. AWS Wickr helps our government customers collaborate securely through messaging, calling, file and screen sharing with end-to-end encryption. The FedRAMP High authorization for Wickr demonstrates our commitment to delivering solutions that give government customers the control and confidence they need to support their sensitive and regulated workloads.” — Christian Hoff, Director, US Federal Civilian & Health at AWS

FedRAMP on AWS

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help you use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. We now offer 150 services that are authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate authorization, and 132 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High authorization.

The FedRAMP High authorization of Wickr further validates our commitment at AWS to public-sector customers. With Wickr, you can combine the security of end-to-end encryption with the administrative flexibility you need to secure mission-critical communications, and keep up with recordkeeping requirements. Wickr is available under FedRAMP High in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

For up-to-date information, see our AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. To learn more about AWS Wickr, visit the AWS Wickr product page, or email [email protected].

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Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

Anne is a Senior Worldwide Security GTM Specialist at AWS, based in Chicago. She has more than a decade of experience in the security industry, and focuses on effectively communicating cybersecurity risk. She maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

Randy Brumfield

Randy Brumfield

Randy leads technology business for new initiatives and the Cloud Support Engineering team for AWS Wickr. Prior to joining AWS, Randy spent close to two and a half decades in Silicon Valley across several start-ups, networking companies, and system integrators in various corporate development, product management, and operations roles. Randy currently resides in San Jose, California.

2023 Canadian Centre for Cyber Security Assessment Summary report available with 20 additional services

Post Syndicated from Naranjan Goklani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/2023-canadian-centre-for-cyber-security-assessment-summary-report-available-with-20-additional-services/

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are committed to providing continued assurance to our customers through assessments, certifications, and attestations that support the adoption of current and new AWS services and features. We are pleased to announce the availability of the 2023 Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) assessment summary report for AWS. With this assessment, a total of 150 AWS services and features are assessed in the Canada (Central) Region, including 20 additional AWS services and features. The assessment report is available for review and download on demand through AWS Artifact.

The full list of services in scope for the CCCS assessment is available on the Services in Scope page. The 20 new services and features are the following:

The CCCS is Canada’s authoritative source of cyber security expert guidance for the Canadian government, industry, and the general public. Public and commercial sector organizations across Canada rely on CCCS’s rigorous Cloud Service Provider (CSP) IT Security (ITS) assessment in their decision to use CSP services. In addition, CCCS’s ITS assessment process is a mandatory requirement for AWS to provide cloud services to Canadian federal government departments and agencies.  

The CCCS cloud service provider information technology security assessment process determines if the Government of Canada (GC) ITS requirements for the CCCS Medium cloud security profile (previously referred to as GC’s PROTECTED B/Medium Integrity/Medium Availability [PBMM] profile) are met as described in ITSG-33 (IT security risk management: A lifecycle approach, Annex 3 – Security control catalogue). As of November 2023, 150 AWS services in the Canada (Central) Region have been assessed by CCCS and meet the requirements for the Medium cloud security profile. Meeting the Medium cloud security profile is required to host workloads that are classified up to and including Medium categorization. On a periodic basis, CCCS assesses new or previously unassessed services and re-assesses the AWS services that were previously assessed to verify that they continue to meet the GC’s requirements. CCCS prioritizes the assessment of new AWS services based on their availability in Canada, and customer demand for the AWS services. The full list of AWS services that have been assessed by CCCS is available on our Services in Scope for CCCS Assessment page.

To learn more about the CCCS assessment or our other compliance and security programs, visit AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

 
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Naranjan Goklani

Naranjan Goklani

Naranjan is an Audit Lead for Canada. He has experience leading audits, attestations, certifications, and assessments across the Americas. Naranjan has more than 13 years of experience in risk management, security assurance, and performing technology audits. He previously worked in one of the Big 4 accounting firms and supported clients from the financial services, technology, retail, and utilities industries.

AWS FedRAMP Revision 5 baselines transition update

Post Syndicated from Kevin Donohue original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-fedramp-revision-5-transition-update/

On May 20, 2023, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) released the FedRAMP Rev.5 baselines. The FedRAMP baselines were updated to correspond with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 Rev. 5 Catalog of Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations and SP 800-53B Control Baselines for Information Systems and Organizations. AWS is transitioning to the updated security requirements and assisting customers by making new resources available (additional information on these resources below). AWS security and compliance teams are analyzing both the FedRAMP baselines and templates, along with the NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 requirements, to help ensure a seamless transition. This post details the high-level milestones for the transition of AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS US East/West FedRAMP-authorized Regions and lists new resources available to customers.

Background

The NIST 800-53 framework is an information security standard that sets forth minimum requirements for federal information systems. In 2020, NIST released Rev. 5 of the framework with new control requirements related to privacy and supply chain risk management, among other enhancements, to improve security standards for industry partners and government agencies. The Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014 is a law requiring the implementation of information security policies for federal Executive Branch civilian agencies and contractors. FedRAMP is a government-wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud service offerings across the federal government by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies. Both FISMA and FedRAMP adhere to the NIST SP 800-53 framework to define security control baselines that are applicable to AWS and its agency customers.

Key milestones and deliverables

The timeline for AWS to transition to FedRAMP Rev. 5 baselines will be predicated on transition guidance and requirements issued by the FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO), our third-party assessment (3PAO) schedule, and the FedRAMP Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) authorization date. Below you will find a list of key documents to help customers get started with Rev. 5 on AWS, as well as timelines for the AWS preliminary authorization schedule.

Key Rev. 5 AWS documents for customers:

  • AWS FedRAMP Rev5 Customer Responsibility Matrix (CRM) – Made available on AWS Artifact September 1, 2023 (attachment within the AWS FedRAMP Customer Package).
  • AWS Customer Compliance Guides (CCG) V2 – AWS Customer Compliance Guides are now available on AWS Artifact. CCGs are mapped to NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 and nine additional compliance frameworks.

AWS GovCloud (US) authorization timeline:

  • 3PAO Rev. 5 annual assessment: January 2024–April 2024
  • Estimated 2024 Rev. 5 P-ATO letter delivery: Q4 2024

AWS US East/West commercial authorization timeline:

  • 3PAO Rev 5. annual assessment: March 2024–June 2024
  • Estimated 2024 Rev. 5 P-ATO letter delivery: Q4 2024

The AWS transition to FedRAMP Rev. 5 baselines will be completed in accordance with regulatory requirements as defined in our existing FedRAMP P-ATO letter, according to the FedRAMP Transition Guidance. Note that FedRAMP P-ATO letters and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Provisional Authorization (PA) letters for AWS are considered active through the transition to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5. This includes through the 2024 annual assessments of AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS US East/West Regions. The P-ATO letters for each Region are expected to be delivered between Q3 and Q4 of 2024. Supporting documentation required for FedRAMP authorization will be made available to U.S. Government agencies and stakeholders in 2024 on a rolling basis and based on the timeline and conclusion of 3PAO assessments.

How to contact us

For questions about the AWS transition to the FedRAMP Rev. 5 baselines, AWS and its services, or for compliance questions, contact [email protected].

To learn more about AWS compliance programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs page. For more information about the FedRAMP project, see the FedRAMP website.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

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Kevin Donohue

Kevin Donohue

Kevin is a Senior Security Partner Strategist on the AWS Global Security and Compliance Acceleration team, specializing in shared responsibility and regulatory compliance support for AWS customers and partners. Kevin began his tenure with AWS in 2019 with the AWS FedRAMP program, where he created Customer Compliance Guides to assist U.S. government customers with their assessment and authorization responsibilities.

AWS achieves QI2/QC2 qualification to host critical data and workloads from the Italian Public Administration

Post Syndicated from Giuseppe Russo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-qi2-qc2-qualification-to-host-critical-data-and-workloads-from-the-italian-public-administration/

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is pleased to announce that it has achieved the QI2/QC2 qualification level, set out by the Italian National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN) in Determination No. 307/2022, for AWS cloud infrastructure and 130 AWS cloud services. The scope of this qualification level includes the management of Critical data and workloads for Italian public administration customers. Customers and partners who manage workloads identified as Critical, according to the rules set out in ACN Determination No. 307/2022, can now benefit from the qualification achieved by AWS.

Obtaining the ACN QI2/QC2 qualification for managing critical data and workloads means that AWS meets the 366 requirements for security, processing capacity, infrastructure reliability, and scalability of cloud services, including being certified according to security and compliance standards such as ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, ISO/IEC 27017:2015, ISO/IEC 27018:2019, Cloud Security Alliance – Star Level 2, ISO 22301, and ISO 20000.

Qualification of cloud infrastructure and services is an integral part of the Italian Cloud Strategy, issued by the Department for Digital Transformation and ACN. The strategy contains guidelines for migrating data and digital services of the Italian Public Administration to the cloud.

The Italian Cloud Strategy starts from the principle that public administrations manage data and workloads that operate at different levels of criticality. When migrating from an on-premises solution to the cloud, public administrations must identify which risk class their workloads and data belong to.

ACN has identified the following three classes of data in relation to the damage that could be caused to the country in the event of a breach in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

  1. Ordinary: Data and services whose deterioration does not cause the interruption of the state service nor, in any case, harm the economic and social wellbeing of the country.
  2. Critical: Data and services whose compromise could compromise the maintenance of important functions for society, health, safety, and the economic and social wellbeing of the country.
  3. Strategic: Data and services that, if compromised, can have an impact on national security.

Different levels of criticality require different levels of qualification according to the following scheme.
 

AWS achieves QI2/QC2 qualification

Figure 1. Different levels of criticality require different levels of qualification

Thanks to the presence of the AWS Europe (Milan) Region since April 2020, and the new QI2/QC2 qualification obtained by AWS, our customers and partners can now feel confident to develop innovative cloud services that manage the critical workloads of the Italian Public Administration that run on AWS cloud infrastructure. The qualification obtained by AWS will be available on the ACN Cloud Market Place in the next weeks.

Our customers can refer to the AWS QI2/QC2 qualification to confirm that the AWS control environment is designed and implemented appropriately. By receiving the qualification to manage Critical workloads, AWS demonstrates our commitment to meet the highest security expectations for cloud service providers set out by ACN.

As always, we value your feedback and questions. Reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page. To learn more about our other compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

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Giuseppe Russo

Giuseppe Russo

Giuseppe is Security Assurance Manager for Italy, based in Rome. Giuseppe has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science with a specialization in cryptography, security and coding theory. Giuseppe is a seasoned information security practitioner with many years of experience engaging regulators, key stakeholders, developing guidelines, and influencing the security market on strategic topics such as privacy and critical infrastructure protection.

Daniele Basriev

Daniele Basriev

Daniele is a security audit program manager at AWS based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Daniele leads security audits, attestations, and certification programs across Europe. For the past 19 years, he has worked with a wide range of technologies, control frameworks, and business risks within complex fast-paced environments. He built his expertise initially within the international consultancy environment and Big Four accounting firms, and then moved into IT security strategy, IT governance, and compliance across multiple industries. His expertise includes, but not limited to, information systems audits, third-party and vendor risk management, IT risk management, business continuity, security governance, and compliance.

iostudio delivers key metrics to public sector recruiters with Amazon QuickSight

Post Syndicated from Jon Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/iostudio-delivers-key-metrics-to-public-sector-recruiters-with-amazon-quicksight/

This is a guest post by Jon Walker and Ari Orlinsky from iostudio written in collaboration with Sumitha AP from AWS.

iostudio is an award-winning marketing agency based in Nashville, TN. We build solutions that bring brands to life, making content and platforms work together. We serve our customers, who range from small technology startups to government agencies, as a social media strategy partner with in-house video production capabilities, a creative resource that provides data-driven insights about a campaign’s performance, a content marketing machine with connections across the United States, and a sophisticated customer engagement partner.

We wanted to include interactive, real-time visualizations to support recruiters from one of our government clients. Our previous solution offered visualization of key metrics, but point-in-time snapshots produced only in PDF format. We chose Amazon QuickSight because it gave us dynamic and interactive dashboards embedded in our application, while saving us money and development time.

In this post, we discuss how we built a solution using QuickSight that delivers real-time visibility of key metrics to public sector recruiters.

Modernized analytics and reporting

At iostudio, we faced the challenge of modernizing our government client’s static recruitment marketing analytics solution. Given the limitations of the static PDF charts used for its recruitment marketing data, we recognized the opportunity to introduce real-time interactive dashboards to improve insights needed to drive recruitment marketing initiatives. With the solution we built using QuickSight, recruiters are given access to rich visualizations on interactive dashboards in real time, eliminating uncertainty about whether the information they are looking at is accurate.

We created a QuickSight dashboard as a proof of concept, and it surpassed our expectations because of its advanced visualizations. We embedded QuickSight dashboards into our web application, making it seamless for recruiters to log in and get the insights they need. Because we used QuickSight anonymous embedding APIs, we were able to do this without registering and managing all our users in QuickSight. After this initial proof of concept, we gained confidence in our solution quickly, and we were able to build and launch our solution to production within 4–6 weeks. As a result, we reduced our development time by 60%, allowing us to bring this embedded analytics solution to our government client faster. We also saved 75% on our annual external software costs. Switching to QuickSight has enabled us to better serve our customers.

Taking care of sensitive data

iostudio operates in the AWS GovCloud environment because many of our customers are government agencies. This makes protecting customer data even more important. When building our solution for recruiters, we needed to ensure that recruiters can only see data related to the marketing campaigns that are assigned to them. We used row-level security with tag-based rules in QuickSight to restrict data on a per-user basis.

Integrating with AWS

With the AWS technology stack, we were able to create a custom-fit solution using a regionally diverse, service-oriented model to improve our time to deliver interactive reporting to our customers while also trimming costs. With AWS, we aren’t forced to pay for a bundle with services that we don’t use. We can pick what we need, and use what we need with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Our client had previously been using a data integration tool called Pentaho to get data from different sources into one place, which wasn’t an optimal solution. The following diagram illustrates our updated solution architecture using AWS services.

The custom-fit solution that we built uses AWS Lambda to extract data from three key data sources: a referral marketing tool, Google analytics data, and call center operations data. The data lands in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, and from there AWS Glue jobs are used to transform the data and load it into another S3 bucket. QuickSight is connected to this data using Amazon Athena, helping us create real-time and interactive dashboards. This end-to-end extract, transform, and load (ETL) process is run with the help of AWS Step Functions, giving us the ability to orchestrate and monitor all the steps of the ETL process seamlessly.

Conclusion

By switching to QuickSight, we were able to provide our client’s recruiters with key metrics in real time, while reducing our development time and cutting costs significantly. Because the components in the architecture are reusable and interoperable, we were able to extend this solution to even more of our customers.

To learn more about how you can embed customized data visuals and interactive dashboards into any application, visit Amazon QuickSight Embedded.

About the Authors

Jon Walker, Senior Director of Engineering, is a native Nashvillian who has been in the technology field for over 19 years. He oversees enterprise-wide system engineering, development, and technology programs for large federal and DoD clients, as well as iostudio’s commercial clients.

Ari Orlinsky, Director of Information Services, leads iostudio’s Information Systems Department, responsible for AWS Cloud, SaaS applications, on-premises technology, risk assessment, compliance, budgeting, and human resource management. With nearly 20 years’ experience in strategic IS and technology operations, Ari has developed a keen enthusiasm for emerging technologies, DOD security and compliance, large format interactive experiences, and customer service communication technologies. As iostudio’s Technical Product Owner across internal and client-facing applications including a cloud-based omni-channel contact center platform, he advocates for secure deployment of applicable technologies to the cloud while ensuring resilient on-premises data center solutions.

Sumitha AP is a Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS. Sumitha works with SMB customers to help them design secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solutions in the AWS Cloud. She has a focus on data and analytics and provides guidance on building analytics solutions on AWS.

Customer Compliance Guides now available on AWS Artifact

Post Syndicated from Kevin Donohue original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/customer-compliance-guides-now-available-on-aws-artifact/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released Customer Compliance Guides (CCGs) to support customers, partners, and auditors in their understanding of how compliance requirements from leading frameworks map to AWS service security recommendations. CCGs cover 100+ services and features offering security guidance mapped to 10 different compliance frameworks. Customers can select any of the available frameworks and services to see a consolidated summary of recommendations that are mapped to security control requirements. 

CCGs summarize key details from public AWS user guides and map them to related security topics and control requirements. CCGs don’t cover compliance topics such as physical and maintenance controls, or organization-specific requirements such as policies and human resources controls. This makes the guides lightweight and focused only on the unique security considerations for AWS services.

Customer Compliance Guides work backwards from security configuration recommendations for each service and map the guidance and compliance considerations to the following frameworks:

  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-53
  • NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)
  • NIST 800-171
  • System and Organization Controls (SOC) II
  • Center for Internet Security (CIS) Critical Controls v8.0
  • ISO 27001
  • NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP)
  • Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) v4.0
  • Department of Defense Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC)
  • HIPAA

Customer Compliance Guides help customers address three primary challenges:

  1. Explaining how configuration responsibility might vary depending on the service and summarizing security best practice guidance through the lens of compliance
  2. Assisting customers in determining the scope of their security or compliance assessments based on the services they use to run their workloads
  3. Providing customers with guidance to craft security compliance documentation that might be required to meet various compliance frameworks

CCGs are available for download in AWS Artifact. Artifact is your go-to, central resource for AWS compliance-related information. It provides on-demand access to security and compliance reports from AWS and independent software vendors (ISVs) who sell their products on AWS Marketplace. To access the new CCG resources, navigate to AWS Artifact from the console and search for Customer Compliance Guides. To learn more about the background of Customer Compliance Guides, see the YouTube video Simplify the Shared Responsibility Model.

 
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Kevin Donohue

Kevin Donohue

Kevin is a Senior Manager in AWS Security Assurance, specializing in shared responsibility compliance and regulatory operations across various industries. Kevin began his tenure with AWS in 2019 in support of U.S. Government customers in the AWS FedRAMP program.

Travis Goldbach

Travis Goldbach

Travis has over 12 years’ experience as a cybersecurity and compliance professional with demonstrated ability to map key business drivers to ensure client success. He started at AWS in 2021 as a Sr. Business Development Manager to help AWS customers accelerate their DFARS, NIST, and CMMC compliance requirements while reducing their level of effort and risk.

The National Intelligence Center of Spain and AWS collaborate to promote public sector cybersecurity

Post Syndicated from Borja Larrumbide original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/the-national-intelligence-center-of-spain-and-aws-collaborate-to-promote-public-sector-cybersecurity/

Spanish version »

The National Intelligence Center and National Cryptological Center (CNI-CCN)—attached to the Spanish Ministry of Defense—and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have signed a strategic collaboration agreement to jointly promote cybersecurity and innovation in the public sector through AWS Cloud technology.

Under the umbrella of this alliance, the CNI-CCN will benefit from the help of AWS in defining the security roadmap of public administrations with different maturity levels and help the CNI-CCN comply with their security requirements and the National Security Scheme.

In addition, CNI-CCN and AWS will collaborate in various areas of cloud security. First, they will work together on cybersecurity training and awareness-raising focused on government institutions, through education, training, and certification programs for professionals who are experts in technology and security. Second, both organizations will collaborate in creating security guidelines for the use of cloud technology, incorporating the shared security model in the AWS cloud and contributing their experience and knowledge to help organizations with the challenges they face. Third, CNI-CCN and AWS will take part in joint events that demonstrate best practices for the deployment and secure use of the cloud, both for public and private sector organizations. Finally, AWS will support cybersecurity operations centers that are responsible for surveillance, early warning, and response to security incidents in public administrations.

Today, AWS has achieved certification in the National Security Scheme (ENS) High category and has been the first cloud provider to accredit several security services in the CNI-CCN’s STIC Products and Services catalog (CPSTIC), meaning that its infrastructure meets the highest levels of security and compliance for state agencies and public organizations in Spain. All of this gives Spanish organizations, including startups, large companies, and the public sector, access to AWS infrastructure that allows them to make use of advanced technologies such as data analysis, artificial intelligence, databases, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and mobile or serverless services, to promote innovation.

In addition, the new cloud infrastructure of AWS in Spain, the AWS Europe (Spain) Region, allows customers who have data residency requirements to store their content in Spain, with the assurance that they maintain full control over the location of their data. This is a critical element for those who have data residency requirements. The launch of the AWS Europe (Spain) Region provides customers building applications that comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) access to another secure AWS Region in the European Union (EU) that helps meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection. AWS is also Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) High certified, meaning its infrastructure meets the highest levels of security and compliance for government agencies and public organizations in Spain.
 

El Centro Nacional de Inteligencia de España y AWS colaboran para promover la ciberseguridad en el sector público

El Centro Nacional de Inteligencia y Centro Criptológico Nacional (CNI-CCN)–adscrito al Ministerio de Defensa de España- y Amazon Web Services (AWS) han firmado un acuerdo de colaboración estratégica para impulsar de forma conjunta la ciberseguridad y la innovación del sector público a través de la tecnología en la Nube de AWS.

Bajo el paraguas de esta alianza, el CNI-CCN se beneficiará de la ayuda de AWS en definir la hoja de ruta de seguridad de las administraciones públicas, con distintos niveles de madurez y ayudar al CNI-CCN en el cumplimiento de sus requisitos de seguridad y el Esquema Nacional de Seguridad.

Además, CNI-CCN y AWS colaborarán en diversos ámbitos en materia de seguridad en la nube. En primer lugar, trabajarán conjuntamente en formación y concienciación en ciberseguridad enfocadas a instituciones gubernamentales, a través de programas de educación, capacitación y certificación de profesionales expertos en tecnología y seguridad. En segundo lugar, ambas organizaciones colaborarán en la creación de guías de seguridad para el uso de tecnología en la nube, incorporando el modelo de seguridad compartida en la nube de AWS y aportando su experiencia y conocimiento para ayudar a las organizaciones con los desafíos a los que se enfrentan. En tercer lugar, CNI-CCN y AWS participarán en eventos conjuntos que demuestren las mejores prácticas de despliegue y uso seguro de la nube, tanto para organizaciones del sector público como privado. Finalmente, AWS apoyará a los centros de operaciones de ciberseguridad encargados de la vigilancia, alerta temprana y respuesta a incidentes de seguridad en las administraciones públicas.

Hoy AWS cuenta con la certificación del Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) categoría Alta y ha sido el primer proveedor de la nube en acreditar varios servicios de seguridad en el catálogo de Productos y Servicios STIC (CPSTIC) del CNI-CCN, los cual significa que su infraestructura cumple con los más altos niveles de seguridad y cumplimiento para agencias estatales y organizaciones públicas en España. Todo ello concede a las organizaciones españolas, incluyendo a startups, grandes empresas, así como al sector público, acceso a infraestructura de AWS que les permita hacer uso de tecnologías avanzadas como análisis de datos, inteligencia artificial, bases de datos, Internet de las Cosas (IoT), aprendizaje automático, y servicios móviles o serverless, para impulsar la innovación.

Además, la nueva infraestructura de nube de AWS en España, la Región AWS Europa (España) permite a los clientes almacenar su contenido en España, con la seguridad de que mantienen el control total sobre la localización de sus datos. Esto es un elemento crítico para quienes tienen requisitos de residencia de datos. Los clientes que desarrollan aplicaciones en cumplimiento con el Reglamento General de Protección de Datos (RGPD) tendrán acceso a otra región de infraestructura segura de AWS en la Unión Europea (UE), respetando los más altos estándares de seguridad, cumplimiento normativo y protección de datos. Hoy AWS también cuenta con la certificación del Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) categoría Alta, lo cual significa que su infraestructura cumple con los más altos niveles de seguridad y cumplimiento para agencias estatales y organizaciones públicas en España.

 
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Borja Larrumbide

Borja Larrumbide

Borja is a Security Assurance Manager for AWS in Spain and Portugal. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Boston University (USA). Since then, he has worked in companies such as Microsoft and BBVA, where he has performed in different roles and sectors. Borja is a seasoned security assurance practitioner with many years of experience engaging key stakeholders at national and international levels. His areas of interest include security, privacy, risk management, and compliance.

AWS Week in Review – March 20, 2023

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-march-20-2023/

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

A new week starts, and Spring is almost here! If you’re curious about AWS news from the previous seven days, I got you covered.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are the launches that got my attention last week:

Picture of an S3 bucket and AWS CEO Adam Selipsky.Amazon S3 – Last week there was AWS Pi Day 2023 celebrating 17 years of innovation since Amazon S3 was introduced on March 14, 2006. For the occasion, the team released many new capabilities:

Amazon Linux 2023 – Our new Linux-based operating system is now generally available. Sébastien’s post is full of tips and info.

Application Auto Scaling – Now can use arithmetic operations and mathematical functions to customize the metrics used with Target Tracking policies. You can use it to scale based on your own application-specific metrics. Read how it works with Amazon ECS services.

AWS Data Exchange for Amazon S3 is now generally available – You can now share and find data files directly from S3 buckets, without the need to create or manage copies of the data.

Amazon Neptune – Now offers a graph summary API to help understand important metadata about property graphs (PG) and resource description framework (RDF) graphs. Neptune added support for Slow Query Logs to help identify queries that need performance tuning.

Amazon OpenSearch Service – The team introduced security analytics that provides new threat monitoring, detection, and alerting features. The service now supports OpenSearch version 2.5 that adds several new features such as support for Point in Time Search and improvements to observability and geospatial functionality.

AWS Lake Formation and Apache Hive on Amazon EMR – Introduced fine-grained access controls that allow data administrators to define and enforce fine-grained table and column level security for customers accessing data via Apache Hive running on Amazon EMR.

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances – You can now update guest environments to a specific or the latest macOS version without having to tear down and recreate the existing macOS environments.

AWS Chatbot – Now Integrates With Microsoft Teams to simplify the way you troubleshoot and operate your AWS resources.

Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection for Amazon Aurora – Now generally available to help profile and monitor access activity to Aurora databases in your AWS account without impacting database performance

AWS Database Migration Service – Now supports validation to ensure that data is migrated accurately to S3 and can now generate an AWS Glue Data Catalog when migrating to S3.

AWS Backup – You can now back up and restore virtual machines running on VMware vSphere 8 and with multiple vNICs.

Amazon Kendra – There are new connectors to index documents and search for information across these new content: Confluence Server, Confluence Cloud, Microsoft SharePoint OnPrem, Microsoft SharePoint Cloud. This post shows how to use the Amazon Kendra connector for Microsoft Teams.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
A few more blog posts you might have missed:

Example of a geospatial query.Women founders Q&A – We’re talking to six women founders and leaders about how they’re making impacts in their communities, industries, and beyond.

What you missed at that 2023 IMAGINE: Nonprofit conference – Where hundreds of nonprofit leaders, technologists, and innovators gathered to learn and share how AWS can drive a positive impact for people and the planet.

Monitoring load balancers using Amazon CloudWatch anomaly detection alarms – The metrics emitted by load balancers provide crucial and unique insight into service health, service performance, and end-to-end network performance.

Extend geospatial queries in Amazon Athena with user-defined functions (UDFs) and AWS Lambda – Using a solution based on Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index (H3) to divide the globe into equally-sized hexagons.

How cities can use transport data to reduce pollution and increase safety – A guest post by Rikesh Shah, outgoing head of open innovation at Transport for London.

For AWS open-source news and updates, here’s the latest newsletter curated by Ricardo to bring you the most recent updates on open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Here are some opportunities to meet:

AWS Public Sector Day 2023 (March 21, London, UK) – An event dedicated to helping public sector organizations use technology to achieve more with less through the current challenging conditions.

Women in Tech at Skills Center Arlington (March 23, VA, USA) – Let’s celebrate the history and legacy of women in tech.

The AWS Summits season is warming up! You can sign up here to know when registration opens in your area.

That’s all from me for this week. Come back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Danilo

New – Amazon Lightsail for Research with All-in-One Research Environments

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-lightsail-for-research-with-all-in-one-research-environments/

Today we are announcing the general availability of Amazon Lightsail for Research, a new offering that makes it easy for researchers and students to create and manage a high-performance CPU or a GPU research computer in just a few clicks on the cloud. You can use your preferred integrated development environments (IDEs) like preinstalled Jupyter, RStudio, Scilab, VSCodium, or native Ubuntu operating system on your research computer.

You no longer need to use your own research laptop or shared school computers for analyzing larger datasets or running complex simulations. You can create your own research environments and directly access the application running on the research computer remotely via a web browser. Also, you can easily upload data to and download from your research computer via a simple web interface.

You pay only for the duration the computers are in use and can delete them at any time. You can also use budgeting controls that can automatically stop your computer when it’s not in use. Lightsail for Research also includes all-inclusive prices of compute, storage, and data transfer, so you know exactly how much you will pay for the duration you use the research computer.

Get Started with Amazon Lightsail for Research
To get started, navigate to the Lightsail for Research console, and choose Virtual computers in the left menu. You can see my research computers naming “channy-jupyter” or “channy-rstudio” already created.

Choose Create virtual computer to create a new research computer, and select which software you’d like preinstalled on your computer and what type of research computer you’d like to create.

In the first step, choose the application you want installed on your computer and the AWS Region to be located in. We support Jupyter, RStudio, Scilab, and VSCodium. You can install additional packages and extensions through the interface of these IDE applications.

Next, choose the desired virtual hardware type, including a fixed amount of compute (vCPUs or GPUs), memory (RAM), SSD-based storage volume (disk) space, and a monthly data transfer allowance. Bundles are charged on an hourly and on-demand basis.

Standard types are compute-optimized and ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors.

Name vCPUs Memory Storage Monthly data
transfer allowance*
Standard XL 4 8 GB 50 GB 0.5TB
Standard 2XL 8 16 GB 50 GB 0.5TB
Standard 4XL 16 32 GB 50 GB 0.5TB

GPU types provide a high-performance platform for general-purpose GPU computing. You can use these bundles to accelerate scientific, engineering, and rendering applications and workloads.

Name GPU vCPUs Memory Storage Monthly data
transfer allowance*
GPU XL 1 4 16 GB 50 GB 1 TB
GPU 2XL 1 8 32 GB 50 GB 1 TB
GPU 4XL 1 16 64 GB 50 GB 1 TB

* AWS created the Global Data Egress Waiver (GDEW) program to help eligible researchers and academic institutions use AWS services by waiving data egress fees. To learn more, see the blog post.

After making your selections, name your computer and choose Create virtual computer to create your research computer. Once your computer is created and running, choose the Launch application button to open a new window that will display the preinstalled application you selected.

Lightsail for Research Features
As with existing Lightsail instances, you can create additional block-level storage volumes (disks) that you can attach to a running Lightsail for Research virtual computer. You can use a disk as a primary storage device for data that requires frequent and granular updates. To create your own storage, choose Storage and Create disk.

You can also create Snapshots, a point-in-time copy of your data. You can create a snapshot of your Lightsail for Research virtual computers and use it as baselines to create new computers or for data backup. A snapshot contains all of the data that is needed to restore your computer from the moment when the snapshot was taken.

When you restore a computer by creating it from a snapshot, you can easily create a new one or upgrade your computer to a larger size using a snapshot backup. Create snapshots frequently to protect your data from corrupt applications or user errors.

You can use Cost control rules that you define to help manage the usage and cost of your Lightsail for Research virtual computers. You can create rules that stop running computers when average CPU utilization over a selected time period falls below a prescribed level.

For example, you can configure a rule that automatically stops a specific computer when its CPU utilization is equal to or less than 1 percent for a 30-minute period. Lightsail for Research will then automatically stop the computer so that you don’t incur charges for running computers.

In the Usage menu, you can view the cost estimate and usage hours for your resources during a specified time period.

Now Available
Amazon Lightsail for Research is now available in the US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and Europe (Sweden) Regions.

Now you can start using it today. To learn more, see the Amazon Lightsail for Research User Guide, and please send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Lightsail or through your usual AWS support contacts.

– Channy

AWS now licensed by DESC to operate as a Tier 1 cloud service provider in the Middle East (UAE) Region

Post Syndicated from Ioana Mecu original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-now-licensed-by-desc-to-operate-as-a-tier-1-cloud-service-provider-in-the-middle-east-uae-region/

We continue to expand the scope of our assurance programs at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are pleased to announce that our Middle East (UAE) Region is now certified by the Dubai Electronic Security Centre (DESC) to operate as a Tier 1 cloud service provider (CSP). This alignment with DESC requirements demonstrates our continuous commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for CSPs. AWS government customers can run their applications in the AWS Cloud certified Regions in confidence.

AWS was evaluated by independent third-party auditor BSI on behalf of DESC on January 23, 2023. The Certificate of Compliance illustrating the AWS compliance status is available through AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

As of this writing, 62 services offered in the Middle East (UAE) Region are in scope of this certification. For up-to-date information, including when additional services are added, visit the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program webpage and choose DESC CSP.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. Please reach out to your AWS account team if you have questions or feedback about DESC compliance.

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.

 
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Ioana Mecu

Ioana Mecu

Ioana is a Security Audit Program Manager at AWS based in Madrid, Spain. She leads security audits, attestations, and certification programs across Europe and the Middle East. Ioana has previously worked in risk management, security assurance, and technology audits in the financial sector industry for the past 15 years.

AWS achieves ISO 20000-1:2018 certification for 109 services

Post Syndicated from Rodrigo Fiuza original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-iso-20000-12018-certification-for-109-services/

We continue to expand the scope of our assurance programs at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are pleased to announce that AWS Regions and AWS Edge locations are now certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 20000-1:2018 standard. This certification demonstrates our continuous commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for cloud service providers.

Published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), ISO 20000-1:2018 helps organizations specify requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving a Service Management System (SMS).

AWS was evaluated by EY CertifyPoint, an independent third-party auditor. The Certificate of Compliance illustrating the AWS compliance status is available through AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

As of this writing, 109 services offered globally are in scope of this certification. For up-to-date information, including when additional services are added, see the AWS ISO 20000-1:2018 certification webpage.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. Reach out to your AWS account team if you have questions or feedback about ISO 20000-1:2018 compliance.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; you can 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.

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Author

Rodrigo Fiuza

Rodrigo is a Security Audit Manager at AWS, based in São Paulo. He leads audits, attestations, certifications, and assessments across Latin America, Caribbean and Europe. Rodrigo has previously worked in risk management, security assurance, and technology audits for the past 12 years.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

Post Syndicated from Aron Nakazato original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-achieves-fedramp-authorization/

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

This post is also available in Deutsch, Français and Español.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

We are excited to announce our public sector suite of services, Cloudflare for Government, has achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (“FedRAMP”) is a US-government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. FedRAMP Moderate Authorization demonstrates Cloudflare’s continued commitment to customer trust, and Cloudflare for Government’s ability to secure and protect US public sector organizations.

Key differentiators

We believe public sector customers deserve the same experience as any other customer — so rather than building a separate platform, we leveraged our existing platform for Cloudflare for Government. Cloudflare’s platform protects and accelerates any Internet application without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. It’s also one of the largest and fastest global networks on the planet.

One of the things that distinguishes Cloudflare for Government from other FedRAMP cloud providers is the number of data centers we have in scope, with each able to run our full stack of FedRAMP Authorized services locally, with a single control plane on our private backbone. Networking and security services can only improve the user experience if they are run as close to the user as possible, even if the user doesn’t live on an east or west coast hub. While other cloud service providers may only have a handful of data centers within their FedRAMP environment, Cloudflare for Government includes over 30 of our US-based data centers. This provides Cloudflare for Government customers with the same speed, availability, and security that non-highly regulated customers have come to expect from us.

Cloudflare for Government services

Cloudflare for Government is a suite of services for U.S. government and public sector agencies, delivered from our global, highly resilient cloud network with built-in security and performance.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

Application services

Web Application Firewall with API protection provides an intelligent, integrated and scalable solution to protect your critical web applications. Rate Limiting protects against denial of service attacks, brute force login attempts, and other abusive behavior that targets the application layer. Load Balancing improves application performance and availability by steering traffic from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools.

Bot Management manages good and bad bots in real-time, helps prevent credential stuffing, content scraping, content spam, inventory hoarding, credit card stuffing, and application DDoS. CDN provides ultra-fast static and dynamic content delivery over our global network; it offers users the ability to exercise precise control over how content is cached, helps reduce bandwidth costs and take advantage of built-in unmetered DDoS protections. Enterprise grade DNS offers the fastest response time, unparalleled redundancy, and advanced security with built-in DDoS mitigation and DNSSEC.

Zero trust

Zero Trust Network Access creates secure boundaries for applications by allowing access to resources after verifying identity, context, and policy adherence for each specific request. Remote Browser Isolation provides a fast and reliable solution for remote browsing by running all browser code in the cloud. Secure Web Gateway protects users and data by inspecting user traffic, filtering and blocking malicious content, and identifying compromised devices.

Network services

Cloudflare for Government can replace your legacy WAN architecture with Cloudflare’s WAN-as-a-Service which provides expansive connectivity, cloud-based security, performance and control. L3/4 DDoS can protect your websites, applications, and network — Cloudflare blocks an average of 87 billion threats per day! Network Interconnect enables you to directly connect your on-premise networks and cloud hosted environments to Cloudflare for Government.

Developer platform

Workers provides a serverless execution environment that allows you to create entirely new applications or augment existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. Workers KV is a global, low-latency, key-value data store. It supports exceptionally high read volumes with low-latency, making it possible to build highly dynamic APIs and websites which respond as quickly as a cached static file would. Durable Objects provides low-latency coordination and consistent storage for the Workers platform through two features: global uniqueness and a transactional storage API.

What’s next for Cloudflare for Government

Our achievement of FedRAMP Moderate for our Cloudflare for Government suite of products is the first step in our journey to help secure government entities. As you may have read earlier this week, our focus hasn’t been only with the US public sector. Our Zero Trust products are being leveraged to protect critical infrastructure in Japan, Australia, Germany, Portugal, and the UK. We’re also securing organizations qualified under Project Galileo and Athenian with our Cloudflare One Zero Trust suite at no cost.  We will expand the Cloudflare for Government suite to allow governments all over the world to have the opportunity to use our services to protect their assets and users.

We aim to help agencies build stronger cybersecurity, without compromising the customer experience of the government services that all US citizens rely on. We invite all our Cloudflare for Government public and private partners to learn more about our capabilities and work with us to develop solutions to the rapidly evolving security demands required in complex environments. Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions.

For more information on Cloudflare’s FedRAMP status, please visit the FedRAMP Marketplace.

Authority to operate (ATO) on AWS Program now available for customers in Spain

Post Syndicated from Greg Herrmann original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/authority-to-operate-on-aws-program-now-available-for-customers-in-spain/

Meeting stringent security and compliance requirements in regulated or public sector environments can be challenging and time consuming, even for organizations with strong technical competencies. To help customers navigate the different requirements and processes, we launched the ATO on AWS Program in June 2019 for US customers. The program involves a community of expert AWS partners to help support and accelerate customers’ ability to meet their security and compliance obligations.

We’re excited to announce that we have now expanded the ATO on AWS Program to Spain. As part of the launch in Spain, we recruited and vetted five partners with a demonstrated competency in helping customers meet Spanish and European Union (EU) regulatory compliance and security requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS), and European Banking Authority guidelines.

How Does the ATO on AWS Program support customers?

The primary offering of the ATO on AWS Program is access to a community of vetted, expert partners that specialize in customers’ authorization needs, whether it be architecting, configuring, deploying, or integrating tools and controls. The team also provides direct engagement activities to introduce you to publicly available and no-cost resources, tools, and offerings so you can work to meet your security obligations on AWS. These activities include one-on-one meetings, answering questions, technical workshops (in specific cases), and more.

Who are the partners?

Partners in the ATO on AWS Program go through a rigorous evaluation conducted by a team of AWS Security and Compliance experts. Before acceptance into the program, the partners complete a checklist of criteria and provide detailed evidence that they meet those criteria.

Our initial launch in Spain includes the following five partners that have successfully met the criteria to join the program. Each partner has also achieved the Esquema Nacional de Seguridad certification.

  • ATOS – a global leader in digital transformation, cybersecurity, and cloud and high performance computing. ATOS was ranked #1 in Managed Security Services (MSS) revenue by Gartner in 2021.
  • Indra Sistemas – a global technology and consulting company that provides proprietary solutions for the transport and defense markets. It also offers digital transformation consultancy and information technologies in Spain and Latin America through its affiliate Minsait.
  • NTT Data EMEAL ­– an operational company created from an alliance between everis and NTT DATA EMEAL to support clients in Europe and Latin America. NTT Data EMEAL supports customers through strategic consulting and advisory services, new technologies, applications, infrastructure, IT modernization, and business process outsourcing (BPO).
  • Telefónica Tech – a leading company in digital transformation. Telefónica Tech combines cybersecurity and cloud technologies to help simplify technological environments and build appropriate solutions for customers.
  • T-Systems – a leading service provider for the public sector in Spain. As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider, T-Systems maintains the Security and Migration Competencies, supporting customers with migration and secure operation of applications.

For a complete list of ATO on AWS Program partners, see the ATO on AWS Partners page.

Engage the ATO on AWS Program

Customers seeking support can engage the ATO on AWS Program and our partners in multiple ways. The best way to reach us is to complete a short, online ATO on AWS Questionnaire so we can learn more about your timeline and goals. If you prefer to engage AWS partners directly, see the complete list of our partners and their contact information at ATO on AWS Partners.

 
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Greg Herrmann

Greg Herrmann

Greg has worked in the security and compliance field for over 18 years, supporting both classified and unclassified workloads for U.S. federal and DoD customers. He has been with AWS for more than 6 years as a Senior Security Partner Strategist for the Security and Compliance Partner Team, working with AWS partners and customers to accelerate security and compliance processes.

Borja Larrumbide

Borja Larrumbide

Borja is a Security Assurance Manager for AWS in Spain and Portugal. Previously, he worked at companies such as Microsoft and BBVA in different roles and sectors. Borja is a seasoned security assurance practitioner with years of experience engaging key stakeholders at national and international levels. His areas of interest include security, privacy, risk management, and compliance.

2022 Canadian Centre for Cyber Security Assessment Summary report available with 12 additional services

Post Syndicated from Naranjan Goklani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/2022-canadian-centre-for-cyber-security-assessment-summary-report-available-with-12-additional-services/

We are pleased to announce the availability of the 2022 Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) assessment summary report for Amazon Web Services (AWS). This assessment will bring the total to 132 AWS services and features assessed in the Canada (Central) AWS Region, including 12 additional AWS services. A copy of the summary assessment report is available for review and download on demand through AWS Artifact.

The full list of services in scope for the CCCS assessment is available on the AWS Services in Scope page. The 12 new services are:

The CCCS is Canada’s authoritative source of cyber security expert guidance for the Canadian government, industry, and the general public. Public and commercial sector organizations across Canada rely on CCCS’s rigorous Cloud Service Provider (CSP) IT Security (ITS) assessment in their decisions to use cloud services. In addition, CCCS’s ITS assessment process is a mandatory requirement for AWS to provide cloud services to Canadian federal government departments and agencies.

The CCCS Cloud Service Provider Information Technology Security Assessment Process determines if the Government of Canada (GC) ITS requirements for the CCCS Medium cloud security profile (previously referred to as GC’s Protected B/Medium Integrity/Medium Availability [PBMM] profile) are met as described in ITSG-33 (IT security risk management: A lifecycle approach). As of November 2022, 132 AWS services in the Canada (Central) Region have been assessed by the CCCS and meet the requirements for the CCCS Medium cloud security profile. Meeting the CCCS Medium cloud security profile is required to host workloads that are classified up to and including the medium categorization. On a periodic basis, CCCS assesses new or previously unassessed services and reassesses the AWS services that were previously assessed to verify that they continue to meet the GC’s requirements. CCCS prioritizes the assessment of new AWS services based on their availability in Canada, and on customer demand for the AWS services. The full list of AWS services that have been assessed by CCCS is available on our Services in Scope for CCCS Assessment page.

To learn more about the CCCS assessment or our other compliance and security programs, visit AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; you can 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. Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Naranjan Goklani

Naranjan Goklani

Naranjan is a Security Audit Manager at AWS, based in Toronto (Canada). He leads audits, attestations, certifications, and assessments across North America and Europe. Naranjan has more than 13 years of experience in risk management, security assurance, and performing technology audits. Naranjan previously worked in one of the Big 4 accounting firms and supported clients from the financial services, technology, retail, ecommerce, and utilities industries.

AWS achieves Spain’s ENS High certification across 166 services

Post Syndicated from Daniel Fuertes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-spains-ens-high-certification-across-166-services/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is committed to bringing additional services and AWS Regions into the scope of our Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) High certification to help customers meet their regulatory needs.

ENS is Spain’s National Security Framework. The ENS certification is regulated under the Spanish Royal Decree 3/2010 and is a compulsory requirement for central government customers in Spain. ENS establishes security standards that apply to government agencies and public organizations in Spain, and service providers on which Spanish public services depend. Updating and achieving this certification every year demonstrates our ongoing commitment to meeting the heightened expectations for cloud service providers set forth by the Spanish government.

We are happy to announce the addition of 17 services to the scope of our ENS High certification, for a new total of 166 services in scope. The certification now covers 25 Regions. Some of the additional security services in scope for ENS High include the following:

  • AWS CloudShell – a browser-based shell that makes it simpler to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources. With CloudShell, you can quickly run scripts with the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), experiment with AWS service APIs by using the AWS SDKs, or use a range of other tools for productivity.
  • AWS Cloud9 – a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that you can use to write, run, and debug your code with just a browser. It includes a code editor, debugger, and terminal.
  • Amazon DevOps Guru – a service that uses machine learning to detect abnormal operating patterns so that you can identify operational issues before they impact your customers.
  • Amazon HealthLake – a HIPAA-eligible service that offers healthcare and life sciences companies a complete view of individual or patient population health data for query and analytics at scale.
  • AWS IoT SiteWise – a managed service that simplifies collecting, organizing, and analyzing industrial equipment data.

AWS achievement of the ENS High certification is verified by BDO Auditores S.L.P., which conducted an independent audit and confirmed that AWS continues to adhere to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability standards at its highest level.

For more information about ENS High, see the AWS Compliance page Esquema Nacional de Seguridad High. To view the complete list of services included in the scope, see the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program – Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) page. You can download the ENS High Certificate from AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console or from the Compliance page Esquema Nacional de Seguridad High.

As always, we are committed to bringing new services into the scope of our ENS High program based on your architectural and regulatory needs. If you have questions about the ENS program, reach out to your AWS account team or contact AWS Compliance.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

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Daniel Fuertes

Daniel Fuertes

Daniel is a Security Audit Program Manager at AWS based in Madrid, Spain. Daniel leads multiple security audits, attestations and certification programs in Spain and other EMEA countries. Daniel has 8 years of experience in security assurance and previously worked as an auditor for PCI DSS security framework.

AWS achieves FedRAMP P-ATO for 20 services in the AWS US East/West Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Post Syndicated from Steve Earley original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-fedramp-p-ato-for-20-services-in-the-aws-us-east-west-regions-and-aws-govcloud-us-regions/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that 20 additional AWS services have achieved Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Joint Authorization Board (JAB). The following are the 20 AWS services with FedRAMP authorization for the U.S. federal government and organizations with regulated workloads:

  • AWS App Mesh provides application-level networking to help your services communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure.
  • AWS Audit Manager helps you to continuously audit your AWS usage to simplify how risk and compliance are assessed with regulations and industry standards.
  • AWS Chatbot is an interactive agent that helps you monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads in your chat channels.
  • Amazon Chime SDK is a collection of client software development kits that use resources in your AWS account to add collaborative audio calling, video calling, and screen share features to your web or mobile applications.
  • AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that helps you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser.
  • Amazon Detective helps you analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities.
  • EC2 Image Builder simplifies the building, testing, and deployment of virtual machine and container images for use on AWS or on-premises.
  • Amazon FinSpace is a data management and analytics service that is purpose built for the financial services industry (FSI).
  • AWS Firewall Manager is a security management service that allows you to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organizations.
  • Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts.
  • Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service.
  • Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a fully managed service that you can use to process and analyze streaming data using Java, SQL, or Scala.
  • Amazon Lex is an AWS service for building conversational interfaces into applications using voice and text.
  • Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is an AWS streaming data service that manages Apache Kafka infrastructure and operations.
  • Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ to help you set up and operate message brokers on AWS.
  • Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that helps you build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.
  • AWS Network Firewall is a managed service that helps you to deploy essential network protections for your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
  • Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) is a purpose-built ledger database that provides a complete and cryptographically verifiable history of changes made to your application data.
  • AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) is designed to help you securely share resources across AWS accounts, within your organization or organizational units (OUs) in AWS Organizations, and with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and users for supported resource types.
  • Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, and serverless time series database service for AWS IoT Core and operational applications that can help you to store and analyze trillions of events per day up to 1,000 times faster and at as little as 1/10th the cost of relational databases.

These 20 services are now listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace and the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.

Service authorizations by AWS Region

The following table shows our most recent FedRAMP service authorizations by Region and authorization level:

Service FedRAMP Moderate in the AWS US East/West Region FedRAMP High in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region
AWS App Mesh ✓  
AWS Audit Manager ✓  
AWS Chatbot ✓  
Amazon Chime SDK   ✓
AWS Cloud9 ✓  
Amazon Detective   ✓
EC2 Image Builder ✓ ✓
Amazon FinSpace ✓  
AWS Firewall Manager ✓ ✓
Amazon Forecast ✓  
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)   ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics ✓ ✓
Amazon Lex   ✓
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) ✓ ✓
Amazon MQ   ✓
Amazon Neptune ✓ ✓
AWS Network Firewall ✓ ✓
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) ✓  
AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) ✓ ✓
Amazon Timestream ✓  

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help customers use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. AWS now offers 123 AWS services authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, and 105 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High Authorization.

To learn what other public sector customers are doing on AWS, see our Government, Education, and Nonprofits Case Studies and Customer Success Stories. Stay tuned for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. Let us know how this post will help your mission by reaching out to your AWS Account Team. Lastly, if you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section.

 
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

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Steve Earley

Steve Earley

Steve leads the Government Audits Team and the commercial Customer Audit Program for AWS. For over 20 years, he has led security organizations and assessed control environments in both public and private sectors as a security executive with multiple organizations. At AWS, he provides direction for AWS services and features seeking adherence to federal compliance requirements while championing for customer-centric innovation.

Whitney Peters

Whitney Peters

Whitney is a part of the U.S. Government Audits Team for AWS. For the past six years, she has guided services internally and externally through various federal compliance frameworks to achieve their Authority to Operate (ATO).

James Mueller

James Mueller

James is a Security Assurance Manager for AWS. For over 20 years, he has served customers in the private, public, and non-profit sectors delivering innovative information technology solutions. He currently leads security compliance efforts to drive adoption of AWS services.

AWS announces migration plans for NIST 800-53 Revision 5

Post Syndicated from James Mueller original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-announces-migration-plans-for-nist-800-53-revision-5/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to begin migration plans for National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-53 Revision 5.

The NIST 800-53 framework is a regulatory standard that defines the minimum baseline of security controls for U.S. federal information systems. In 2020, NIST released Revision 5 of the framework to improve security standards for industry partners and government agencies. The set of NIST 800-53 controls provides a foundation for additional laws and regulations within the U.S. government.

The Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014 is a law that requires federal agencies and contractors to meet information security standards. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a federal government program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring of cloud services. Both FISMA and FedRAMP rely on the NIST 800-53 framework.

NIST 800-53 Revision 5

AWS meets the NIST 800-53 Revision 4 regulatory standards mandated by government authorities. NIST added numerous security enhancements, such as privacy and supply chain management, to Revision 5 to keep abreast of emerging threats to federal information systems.

In preparation for federal regulators to accept NIST 800-53 Revision 5 as the new requirement standard, AWS has begun efforts to adapt to the new security controls, processes, and procedures. AWS security compliance teams have analyzed the new requirements and launched a project to implement the updates. Although AWS is not required to migrate to the new Revision 5 standard until NIST announces the official regulatory compliance deadline, we are already taking steps to meet the deadline.

To learn more about AWS compliance programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs 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.

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James Mueller

James Mueller

James is a Security Assurance Manager for AWS. For over 20 years, he has served customers in the private, public, and non-profit sectors delivering innovative information technology solutions. He currently leads security compliance efforts to drive adoption of AWS services.

AWS achieves the first OSCAL format system security plan submission to FedRAMP

Post Syndicated from Matthew Donkin original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-the-first-oscal-format-system-security-plan-submission-to-fedramp/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the first cloud service provider to produce an Open Security Control Assessment Language (OSCAL)–formatted system security plan (SSP) for the FedRAMP Project Management Office (PMO). OSCAL is the first step in the AWS effort to automate security documentation to simplify our customers’ journey through cloud adoption and accelerate the authorization to operate (ATO) process.

AWS continues its commitment to innovation and customer obsession. Our incorporation of the OSCAL format will improve the customer experience of reviewing and assessing security documentation. It can take an estimated 4,200 workforce hours for companies to receive an ATO, with much of the effort due to manual review and transcription of documentation. Automating this process through a machine-translatable language gives our customers the ability to ingest security documentation into a governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) tool to automate much of this time-consuming task. AWS worked with an AWS Partner, to ingest the AWS SSP through their tool, Xacta.

This is a first step in several initiatives AWS has planned to automate the security assurance process across multiple compliance frameworks. We continue to look for ways to earn trust with our customers, and over the next year we will continue to release new solutions that customers can use to rapidly deploy secure and innovative services.

“Providing the SSP packages in OSCAL is a great milestone in security automation marking the beginning of a new era in cybersecurity. We appreciate the leadership in this area and look forward to working with all cyber professionals, in particular with the visionary cloud service providers, to help deliver secure innovation faster to the people they serve.”

– Dr. Michaela Iorga, OSCAL Strategic Outreach Director, NIST

To learn more about OSCAL, visit the NIST OSCAL website. To learn more about FedRAMP’s plans for OSCAL, visit the FedRAMP Blog.

To learn what other public sector customers are doing on AWS, see our Government, Education, and Nonprofits case studies and customer success stories. Stay tuned for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. Let us know how this post will help your mission by reaching out to your AWS account team. Lastly, if you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section.

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Matthew Donkin

Matthew Donkin

Matthew Donkin, AWS Security Compliance Lead, provides direction and guidance for security documentation automation, physical security compliance, and assists customers in navigating compliance in the cloud. He is leading the development of the industries’ first open security controls assessment language (OSCAL) artifacts for adoption of a faster and more reliable way to process resource intensive documentation within the authorization process.

AWS Wickr achieves FedRAMP Moderate authorization

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-wickr-achieves-fedramp-moderate-authorization/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that AWS Wickr has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization at the Moderate impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB).

FedRAMP is a U.S. government–wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies.

Customers find security and control in Wickr

AWS Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service with features designed to help keep your communications secure, private, and compliant. Wickr protects one-to-one and group messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and location sharing with 256-bit encryption, and provides data retention capabilities.

Administrative controls allow your AWS Wickr administrators to add, remove, and invite users, and organize them into security groups to manage messaging, calling, security, and federation settings. You can reset passwords and delete profiles remotely, helping you reduce the risk of data exposure stemming from a lost or stolen device.

You can log internal and external communications—including conversations with guest users, contractors, and other partner networks—in a private data store that you manage. This allows you to retain messages and files that are sent to and from your organization, to help meet requirements such as those that fall under the Federal Records Act (FRA) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The FedRAMP milestone

In obtaining a FedRAMP Moderate authorization, AWS Wickr has been measured against a set of security controls, procedures, and policies established by the U.S. Federal Government, based on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

“For many federal agencies and organizations, having the ability to securely communicate and share information—whether in an office or out in the field—is key to helping achieve their critical missions. AWS Wickr helps our government customers collaborate securely through messaging, calling, file and screen sharing with end-to-end encryption. The FedRAMP Moderate authorization for Wickr demonstrates our commitment to delivering solutions that give government customers the control and confidence they need to support their sensitive and regulated workloads.” – Christian Hoff, Director, US Federal Civilian & Health at AWS

FedRAMP on AWS

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help you use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. We now offer148 services authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate authorization, and 128 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High authorization.

The FedRAMP Moderate authorization of AWS Wickr further validates our commitment at AWS to public-sector customers. With AWS Wickr, you can combine the security of end-to-end encryption with the administrative flexibility you need to secure mission-critical communications, and keep up with recordkeeping requirements. AWS Wickr is available under FedRAMP Moderate in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) Region.

For up-to-date information, see our AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. To learn more about AWS Wickr, visit the AWS Wickr product page, or email [email protected].

If you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section below.

Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

Anne is a Senior Worldwide Security GTM Specialist at AWS, based in Chicago. She has more than a decade of experience in the security industry, and focuses on effectively communicating cybersecurity risk. She maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

Randy Brumfield

Randy Brumfield

Randy leads technology business for new initiatives and the Cloud Support Engineering team for AWS Wickr. Prior to joining AWS, Randy spent close to two and a half decades in Silicon Valley across several start-ups, networking companies, and system integrators in various corporate development, product management, and operations roles. Randy currently resides in San Jose, California.