Do you know What Is AWS Guardrails? If you’re new to the world of software development, then fret not as this article walks you through the intricacies of AWS Guardrails.
AWS Guardrails are a technical solution for keeping in check the consequence of risk within Amazon web services.
Security guardrails provide the best way to avoid security pitfalls and prevent security bugs.
AWS Control Tower offers preventive and detective guardrails as a precautionary measure that can be allowed at an environment, resource, account, or Organizational Unit (OU) stage.
Guardrails are essential in managing your AWS environments because they provide an automated method of carrying out policy intentions.
AWS Control Tower offers two types of guardrails, preventive and detective, to ensure maximum security of your important data used in business.
What Is AWS Guardrails?
Amazon Web Services Guardrails are high levels of rules and regulations that provide strict control and governance of the data we store in our AWS environment.
It makes it easy through the dashboard to audit the ongoing operations there.
Preventive Guardrails implement service-built policies while Detective Guardrails detect the non-compliance of stored resources.
Preventive Guardrails
Preventive guardrails help apply selected policies to make one’s accounts work according to guidelines and prohibit actions resulting in policy non-compliance.
It restricts what one AWS account can do by allowing only selected services, territories, and support activities at the correct scale.
Detective Guardrails
Detective guardrails identify and notify of suspicious activity and non-compliance with one account’s information, assets, or policy violations.
Detective Guardrails help notify things that need fixing, whether manual or automated.
Default Protection
In general, these Guardrails are usually set by default in our AWS Control Tower as a precautionary measure to ensure the security of our data.
Some guardrails can be set manually. It ensures security controls; thus, when security controls are pre-defined in the pre-development process, development teams are less expected to overlook and bypass security boundaries.
Uses Cases of Amazon Web Services Guardrails
The following are the use case performances Amazon Web Services Guardrails offers you.
1. Detection of Security Breach
The Amazon Web Services Guardrails enabled access logging for a log of archived accounts that disallowed any configuration changes in clouds and immediately alerted if someone breached it.
It maintains the security of the Amazon Web Services control tower and deactivates the creation of authorization keys for the root user lessening the risk of unauthorized access to all resources in the account.
2. Prevention of Data Pitfalls
Preventive guardrails service control policies don’t allow permission to access data more than any person or that specific person in the organization.
Detective guardrails arranged Amazon Web Services Config Rules and AWS Lambda functions which detect any configuration change and the frequency you specify to secure data.
3. Restriction
Choosing the proper guardrails for your environments is critical in managing and governing your AWS resources and restricting their unauthorized use.
Restriction to the use of guardrails is very important for managing configuration compliance in any IT service to ensure the security, secrecy, authenticity, and accessibility of data.
Reasons to Invest In Amazon Web Services Guardrails
Guardrails are pre-planned administrative rules for safety, processes, and conformance that you can choose and implement for specific groups of users or their entire organization.
It protects resources per policies set by the organization and by default settings and checks any illegal data usage against set permission.
Some of the primary reasons are discussed below:
1. Safety
For any business, data safe from unauthorized users is the biggest concern as it can leak your confidential secrets or data to others; thus, using Guardrails help in making them secure.
It can both prevent and detect configuration changes in your control tower against allowed permission and informing, and correct control can make your information safer.
2. Continuous detection
- For any business security against unseen threats from competitors, it is very important to detect any changes in your data continuously.
- These guardrails can also help your business with this matter.
- Using detective guardrails ensures the data access is per the allowed limit set by the organization or administrator.
- In case of any illegal activity, it quickly prompts authorities to secure your business data.
3. Guardrail Status Through Updates
For any business success, it is imperative to keep checking progress and work updates, using these guardrails from your dashboard allows you to check progress.
Guardrail also senses nonconformity of resources within your accounts, such as regulation misuses, and delivers alerts through the dashboard to save resources necessary for your business.
4. Access Permission
AWS Control Tower also provides access permission using default security features based on AWS best practices or custom security features set by the organization’s administration.
It also looks out for public read access detection and changes to bucket policy to limit access and cross-region networking permission to users, which maximizes the security of your business.
Brands That Use AWS Guardrails for Their Brands
The following are the major AWS Guardrails example.
1. Rego Consulting
Rego Consulting, founded in 2007, has become one of the biggest international enterprises for providing plans and flexible software solution sales and services.
They use Amazon Control Tower secured feature Guardrails to monitor and control any changes in configuration in their clouds and immediately get alerts to secure their precious business data.
2. Symetra
Symetra, an American multinational corporation founded in 1957, offers retirement plans, employee benefits, insurance products, and life insurance.
They use Amazon Control Tower secured feature Guardrails to secure all data, including policy information and medical information, which is compulsory to ensure as per company policy.
3. Atos
Atos is a French multinational information technology service and consulting company founded in 1997 that assists businesses with application transformation and cloud migration.
They use Amazon Control Tower secured feature Guardrails to address the data placement requirements of clients to ensure maximum security and delivery on time, thanks to Amazon Web Services.
4. Bristol Myers Squibb
Bristol-Myers Squibb is a US-based multinational pharmaceutical company founded in 1877 to explore, create, and innovate medicinal products that help patients cope with deadly infections and diseases.
They use Amazon Control Tower secured feature Guardrails to monitor its continuous data for pharmaceutical development without losing it and keep on progressing without any hurdles and loss.
5. Soft Serve
Soft Serve is a digital consulting firm with experience in healthcare, retail, media, finance, and software.
They incorporate final solutions that can provide customers with the advancement, reliability, and pace they imagine.
They use Amazon Control Tower secured feature to smoothly monitor and migrate their customers’ data for hassle-free working, thanks to Amazon Web Services.
Benefits of Amazon Web Services Guardrails
The following are the benefits of using Amazon Web Services Guardrails:
Mandatory guardrails are permitted by default when you establish your AWS landing zone and can’t be disabled by any users, limiting the control encryption changes in Amazon S3 Bucket.
Mandatory guardrails stop changes in logging configuration for the Amazon S3 bucket to protect the log archive account created in AWS Control Tower.
2. Storage Encryption Detection.
It helps in detecting whether storage encryption is allowed or not in the Amazon RDS database for backup and transmitting data.
Its secure Amazon RDS database automated backups read logs, and screenshots attempts. It notifies the illegal activities to secure the data from intruders.
3. Restriction of Unknown Actions
You can lock up or monitor attempts to accomplish commonly limited actions inside an Amazon web services enterprise environment using optional guardrails.
Selected guardrails are not enabled by default, but they can be turned off, which enhances data residency security in a special section that includes the optional guardrails for data location and restriction to access.
4. Continuous data monitoring
It is critical for any business’s security to consider unseen threats from competitors and monitor any changes in your data continuously.
With the help of detectives, guardrails ensure that data access is within limits set by the organization or administrator and that any illegal activity is quickly reported to authorities maximizing your data security.
AWS IAM vs SCP
| IAM | SCP |
| IAM gives permissions to users, groups on the account level | SCP similar to IAM gives permission on the Organization level, which extends to all the accounts attached to the Organization. |
AWS guardrails vs guardduty
| Guardrails | Guardduty |
| Guardrails define the policies that are used to set permission over the Organization level to have better control over the resources and safety. | Whereas Guardduty is a tool for threat detection across your accounts. It keeps monitoring your accounts for any kind of unwanted behavior or activities. |
FAQs of Amazon Web Services Guardrails
Q: What exactly does guardrail compliance mean?
Guardrails compliances are standard procedures and guidelines for circumstances that may have unsafe conditions or result in unfavorable outcomes.
Q: How can we enable the Amazon Web Services guardrail?
We can enable the AWS guardrail by using AWS Control Tower Dashboard.
Q: How many main types of Amazon Web Services guardrails are there?
AWS Control Tower offers two major guardrails, namely preventive guardrails, and detective guardrails
Q: How can we deactivate the Amazon Web Services guardrail?
Choose Guardrails in the left sidebar of AWS Control Tower Dashboard using the Disable Region Deny Guardrail option, but it is only permitted by authority.
Q: Where to find Amazon Web Services guardrail?
It is present as a built-in feature in AWS Control Tower Dashboard.
Q: AWS guardrails pricing?
Check the complete pricing part for AWS guardrails pricing
Final Word
A guardrail is an essential preventive or detective tool for checking data logs, tracing data location, and ensuring its security is not compromised.
AWS guardrail helps in monitoring security pitfalls and preventing security bugs from maximizing the efficiency of the Amazon Web Services environment.
I am an Amazon Web Services Professional, having more than 11 years of experience in AWS and other technologies. Extensively working in various AWS tools like S3, Lambda, API, Kinesis, Load Balancers, EKS, ECS, and many more. Working as a Solution Architect and Technology Lead for Architecting and implementing the same for different clients. He provides expert solutions around the world and especially in countries like the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Check out the complete profile on About us.
