Secure and Compliant Cloud Environments for Banks and Credit Unions: Leveraging AWS Control Tower

For financial institutions looking to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud or deploy homegrown, born-in-the-cloud applications, it is critical to first set up a secure and well-organized account structure. It might be tempting to just spin up an account and start deploying compute, storage, and networking, but laying a solid foundation on which it all will rest is key. It is considered an anti-pattern to have a cloud footprint consisting of a single giant account that contains all your resources. Today it is recommended to have a collection of single-purpose accounts organized into logical groupings. There might be a workloads grouping that has an account for development, one for performance testing, a sandbox account, and a production account. In another grouping, there might be a security tooling account, a logging account, and an audit account. Using multiple accounts provides separation of resources which can promote good security boundaries, but it also increases complexity.

How do we address that?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)provides a service called Control Tower to guide and simplify a multi-account cloud footprint. Control Tower provides a structure for managing a multi-account environment, which is crucial for ensuring security and compliance, especially for highly-regulated entities.

Here are features and benefits to consider:

Control Tower automates the setup of a baseline environment, creating new AWS accounts using best practices blueprints. This ensures that each account is properly configured with security and compliance guardrails from the start. These guardrails are pre-configured policies and configurations designed to enforce security best practices, such as enforcing encryption, setting up logging, and defining access controls. The responsibility still lies with the customer to select proper guardrails.

Control Tower also provides a centralized dashboard for monitoring and managing compliance across multiple AWS accounts. This allows organizations to have visibility into their overall cloud environment and ensures consistent enforcement of policies.

Control Tower can automatically remediate policy violations, helping to maintain a compliant environment even as the organization scales. This reduces the manual effort required to address security and compliance issues.

Control Tower integrates with other AWS services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail to provide comprehensive security and compliance capabilities. This allows organizations to leverage the full suite of AWS tools for managing their cloud environment securely.

Control Tower continuously monitors the accounts for compliance deviations and security threats. It provides alerts and recommendations for improvements, allowing organizations to stay proactive in maintaining a secure and compliant cloud environment.

By leveraging AWS Control Tower, banks and credit unions can establish a robust foundation for their cloud infrastructure that meets stringent security and compliance requirements, helping to protect sensitive data and mitigate regulatory risks.

Summit Technology Consulting Group is an AWS Service Delivery Partner badged for AWS Control Tower!

We can help your team quickly deploy applications to the cloud, provision compliant AWS accounts, deploy controls supporting digital sovereignty and increase security without compromising agility. Contact us about Control Tower workshops, pricing and deployment options that will satisfy your organization's needs.