Incident Response and Compliance Automation
Explore how to design and implement automated incident response and compliance monitoring in multi-account AWS environments. Understand the integration of AWS Config for drift detection, EventBridge and Lambda for event-driven remediation, and AWS Audit Manager for audit evidence collection. Gain skills to enforce governance continuously while balancing centralized visibility with distributed execution for scalable compliance.
Detecting threats across a multi-account AWS environment is only half the governance equation. GuardDuty, Macie, Inspector, and Detective surface findings, but without automated enforcement, those findings accumulate as unresolved risk. Enterprise-scale compliance demands a closed-loop architecture in which configuration drift is continuously detected, noncompliant resources are automatically corrected, and audit evidence is collected without human intervention.
This lesson builds the enforcement and audit layer that transforms detection signals into governance outcomes, using AWS Config for drift detection, Amazon EventBridge for event routing, AWS Lambda and Systems Manager Automation for remediation, and AWS Audit Manager plus AWS Artifact for regulatory evidence. SAP-C02 expects architects to design policy-driven, multi-account governance rather than ad hoc, per-account scripts, combining preventive controls like SCPs and IAM permission boundaries with detective and corrective controls that operate continuously across distributed environments.
Continuous compliance monitoring with AWS Config
AWS Config continuously records configuration changes to AWS resources and evaluates those configurations against desired-state rules. Unlike preventive controls that block disallowed actions before they occur, Config operates as a
Config rules and conformance packs
Config rules define the compliance logic. Two categories exist:
AWS-managed rules provide prebuilt checks for common requirements, such as encrypted EBS volumes, restricted SSH access, or required tagging. They cover more than 300 compliance scenarios without custom code.
Custom rules use Lambda functions to implement organization-specific policies, such as verifying that EC2 instances belong to approved AMI families or that VPC flow logs are enabled with a specific retention period.
Deploying rules individually across hundreds of accounts creates an operational burden. Conformance packs solve this by bundling Config rules and their associated remediation actions into a single deployable unit. A security team authors a conformance pack template once, then deploys it across all member ...