Source URL: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplify-governance-with-declarative-policies/
Source: AWS News Blog
Title: Simplify governance with declarative policies
Feedly Summary: With only a few steps, create declarative policies and enforce desired configuration for AWS services across your organization, reducing ongoing governance overhead and providing transparency for administrators and end users.
AI Summary and Description: Yes
**Summary:** The text introduces a new capability in AWS called declarative policies, which allows organizations to define and enforce configuration standards for AWS services at scale, addressing governance and compliance challenges by automating policy management across multiple accounts.
**Detailed Description:**
The announcement revolves around the implementation of declarative policies in AWS, a mechanism designed for system administrators and security professionals to simplify the configuration management and enforcement across various cloud services. This new feature holds significant implications for security and compliance in cloud environments.
Key Insights and Features:
– **Centralized Configuration:** Organizations can set and enforce standards for cloud resource configurations in a central location, ensuring consistency across all AWS accounts.
– **Error Messaging:** When configurations deviate from the stated policies, users receive actionable error messages that help correct the compliance violations, thereby enhancing usability and response times in governance.
– **Automatic Enforcement:** Once a declarative policy is applied, AWS ensures that the desired state is maintained automatically, even as new features or APIs are introduced. This reduces manual oversight and operational complexity associated with governance.
– **Visibility and Monitoring:** Administrators gain visibility into service attribute statuses, enabling them to monitor compliance effectively across their entire AWS environment.
– **Use Cases from ABSA:** The text elaborates on how ABSA, a heavily regulated financial services provider, extensively utilizes these policies to manage their security controls efficiently. Key takeaways from their experience include:
– Reducing operational complexity.
– Streamlining policy creation for new features and APIs.
– Improving governance through error messages that redirect users to internal help resources.
– **Support for Multiple Services:** The initial rollout supports critical services like Amazon EC2, VPC, and EBS, indicating a broad applicability of the declarative policies for essential cloud infrastructure.
– **Implementation Process:** The process for setting up declarative policies is user-friendly, allowing administrators to define and impose policies through various interfaces such as the AWS Organizations console and CLI.
– **Compliance and Inheritance:** When new accounts are added, they automatically inherit the relevant policies, ensuring immediate compliance without additional configuration.
– **Geographical Availability:** Declarative policies are implemented across various AWS regions, including AWS GovCloud and China, showcasing AWS’s commitment to meeting compliance needs globally.
Overall, *declarative policies in AWS* represent a significant step towards automating and securing cloud governance, making compliance easier and reducing the overhead involved in managing AWS configurations. This is critical for organizations facing stringent regulatory requirements and enhances operational effectiveness in security management.