AWS Config customers

With AWS, we’ve completely changed how we work and can now scale without adding headcount by automating compliance processes. Compliance can be complex to manage, but AWS Config helps even those of us with no deep knowledge in compliance to implement compliance with out-of-the-box templates. The dashboard provides users with information like non-compliant resources that can be used to improve security posture, and acts as a starting point for discussion with the rest of the organization of what we need to look at and remediate. As the digital group providing technical leadership through cloud technologies for both internal and external teams, it’s important to have centralized visibility and control over our entire organization’s security posture.  The pre-packaged Config conformance pack templates have simplified this process and is a key factor in accelerating our overall migration to the cloud.

We need an infrastructure-wide inventory of our AWS resources to answer questions like ‘which resources do we have deployed?’, ‘where are they deployed?’, ‘how are they configured?’, ‘which changes were made?’, ‘when did the change occur?’, and ‘who made the change?’. Before AWS Config, we needed to manually develop tooling to collect the proper inventory of our AWS resources with change history. Now, using Config, we can meet our security requirements and eliminate the need to maintain our own tooling for that purpose. AWS is also committed to onboarding new and existing resource types to enable full resource visibility. As a result, we are certain that our asset inventory can scale to our existing and future infrastructure.

AWS Config has greatly simplified our multi-account and multi-region strategy. At Genesys, we extend complete flexibility to our developers to experiment in their respective AWS accounts. While this approach fosters innovation, it also creates unique challenges in terms of unwanted resources lingering in those accounts, thereby increasing cost. Deploying the AWS Config configuration recorder across all deployed AWS Regions and accounts enables us to detect and clean-up unused resources, resulting in significant cost reductions. It also enables us to better optimize our usage of AWS and avoid running up against AWS resource limits. Combined with AWS Config’s centralized reporting through aggregators, we get a holistic view of all of our environments in a single place.

Our use of AWS Systems Manager has saved hundreds of engineer hours per year by fully automating patch management and automatically fixing broken hosts. We use Amazon CloudWatch for day-to-day autoscaling, as well as resource utilization management and tracking. With AWS CloudTrail, we can audit logs for changes, allowing us to meet compliance requirements. Using AWS Config, we can easily visualize and navigate timelines of configuration changes in our environment. Overall, the Management and Governance services have allowed us to establish secure management at scale while saving costs.

Prior to using AWS Management Tools, our compliance and disaster recovery processes required significant human effort. With AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS CloudFormation, we were able to automate many of our processes and easily achieve our recovery and compliance audit requirements.

Before we had access to AWS tools, we had to do lots of configuration and process logging and then absorb everything into a centralized platform to understand security events after the fact. By using AWS Systems Manager and the other AWS tools, we’ve gone from zero to 100 percent real-time visibility, a night-and-day contrast with our prior security posture.