As organizations adapt to hybrid work and more and more cloud services are deployed, new service entities that collaborate and exchange data without human interaction, such as virtual machines and containers, are proliferating. The growth of these service accounts and identities and their increasing volumes of permissions, privileges, and entitlements expose organizations to new attack vectors. 

Article originally posted to the GovDevSecOpsHub here.

In its 2021 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera shared the results of a survey on cloud adoption and migrations across industries and types of organizations. The report confirms that cloud migrations are accelerating rapidly, as IT leaders grapple with the pressure to accelerate their modernizations while managing costs. And the public sector is no exception to this trend.

As I.T. professionals, security needs to be at the forefront of everything that we do. Even in mature organizations with robust cloud deployments we must always believe there is room for improvement. Here are four considerations to make when evaluating the security of your AWS workloads.  

How will you utilize your logging data?

Cloud billing can be a tedious and complicated task if not planned for correctly. If you do not have a well thought out plan on how to approach your AWS bill when charging back to various departments or projects, things can get messy when attempting to divide the bill correctly. In this article we will discuss three methods to make strategizing your approach ahead of time to make things much easier when it comes to invoice time.
 
Cost Allocation Tags

The AWS Public Sector Summit is less than two weeks away. This event brings the public sector cloud community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. This will be the second year in a row as a virtual event. If last year was any indication the event will be just as impactful as a virtual experience. DLT continues to be a proud sponsor and will be taking part in the day’s activities.

2020 was a transformative year for public sector IT. Accelerated by necessity, agencies rapidly scaled and secured their digital ecosystems to accommodate a newly remote workforce. Against this backdrop, significant cybersecurity hacks revealed continued vulnerabilities in the federal supply chain and state and local IT infrastructures.

Looking forward there is much work to be done. A new administration, new regulations and continued reliance on the cloud will shape public sector IT through 2021.

Teresa Carlson, Vice President, AWS Public Sector held a leadership session, From complexity to clarity: The strategic value of AWS. Teresa’s breakout highlighted how crucial cloud technology has been for organizations. The AWS cloud provides the ability to respond quickly to the new reality brought on by the ongoing global crisis. Several AWS customers shared how they were able to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges using the cloud. Furthermore, how they are driving impact around big ideas, discoveries, and turning points to solve some of the world’s largest challenges.

Sandy Carter, Vice President WWPS at AWS led a leadership session, Keeping “mission-critical” critical but simple focusing on the available AWS programs for public sector partners. These are specific programs that enable partners to focus on mission-critical work. Several partner success stories were shared with a special nod to DLT and the success with the NewBe program! The New Business Engagement (NewBE) Program provides additional monthly rebates for SLED customers that are 100% new to AWS.

Adoption of Amazon Web Service (AWS) in the public sector is skyrocketing. Today, approximately 6,500 agencies use AWS to accelerate innovation while balancing economy, agility, security, compliance, and reliability. 

This represents a tremendous opportunity for technology product and services providers to sell and deploy cloud applications and solutions to public sector organization who are rapidly adopting the cloud.