AWS Foundational Security Best Practices

AWS Audit Manager provides a prebuilt standard framework that supports the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices.

What is the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard?

The AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard is a set of controls that detect when your deployed accounts and resources deviate from security best practices.

You can use this standard to continually evaluate all of your AWS accounts and workloads and quickly identify areas of deviation from best practices. The standard provides actionable and prescriptive guidance on how to improve and maintain your organization’s security posture.

The controls include best practices from across multiple AWS services. Each control is assigned a category that reflects the security function that it applies to. For more information, see Control categories in the AWS Security Hub User Guide.

Using this framework

You can use the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices framework to help you prepare for audits. This framework includes a prebuilt collection of controls with descriptions and testing procedures. These controls are grouped into control sets according to AWS Foundational Security Best Practices requirements. You can also customize this framework and its controls to support internal audits with specific requirements.

Using the framework as a starting point, you can create an Audit Manager assessment and start collecting evidence that’s relevant for your audit. After you create an assessment, Audit Manager starts to assess resources in your AWS accounts and services. It does this based on the controls that are defined in the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices framework. When it's time for an audit, you—or a delegate of your choice—can review the evidence that Audit Manager collected. Either, you can browse the evidence folders in your assessment and choose which evidence you want to include in your assessment report. Or, if you enabled evidence finder, you can search for specific evidence and export it in CSV format, or create an assessment report from your search results. Either way, you can use this assessment report to show that your controls are working as intended.

The AWS Foundational Security Best Practices framework details are as follows:

The controls in this AWS Audit Manager framework aren't intended to verify if your systems are compliant with AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. Moreover, they can't guarantee that you'll pass an AWS Foundational Security Best Practices audit.

You can find this framework under the Standard frameworks tab of the framework library in Audit Manager.

Next steps

For instructions on how to create an assessment using this framework, see Creating an assessment in AWS Audit Manager.

For instructions on how to customize this framework to support your specific requirements, see Making an editable copy of an existing framework in AWS Audit Manager.

Additional resources