How HeyJobs Improved Organisational Security using AWS SCP

Have you faced similar issues in managing security within your organisations AWS environment?

In today’s fast-paced digital world, the cloud has become an essential component for organizations to run their infrastructure and applications. Amazon Web Services (AWS) plays a pivotal role in HeyJobs’ technology stack, offering a plethora of robust services and features. But with great power comes great responsibility, and HeyJobs understands the importance of ensuring their AWS environment adheres to stringent security and compliance standards to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory requirements.

Challenges: Leveraging AWS Organization for Enhanced Security

HeyJobs, like many tech-driven companies, faced several security challenges in managing their AWS infrastructure:

1. Multiple Account Strategy: With different teams and projects, HeyJobs opted for a multiple AWS account strategy to maintain separation of concerns. However, this approach posed a challenge in maintaining consistent security standards across all accounts.
2. Dedicated Security Allowance: HeyJobs needed a way to ensure that their security team had dedicated tools and resources to enforce security policies effectively, leading them to explore AWS SCPs.
3. Resource Visibility: With an increasingly complex infrastructure, HeyJobs struggled to maintain visibility into all AWS resources, making it difficult to enforce security policies uniformly.

The Power of AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs)

To address the challenges, HeyJobs turned to AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs), a robust feature within AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). SCPs provide organizations with a centralized mechanism to establish fine-grained controls over their AWS accounts. Unlike traditional IAM policies that operate within individual AWS accounts, SCPs work at the AWS Organizations level, allowing HeyJobs to define permissions and restrictions that affect all accounts within our organization.

Key Benefits of SCP Implementation

HeyJobs quickly realized the immense benefits of implementing SCPs within their AWS environment:

1. Centralized Governance: Instead of creating individual IAM policies for each account, we established common security standards from a single point, streamlining governance.
2. Risk Reduction: SCPs mitigated the risks associated with misconfigured resources or accidental data exposure by limiting access to critical resources, reducing the impact of potential security breaches.
3. Regulatory Compliance: In the highly regulated tech industry, HeyJobs used SCPs to meet industry-specific security standards, ensuring compliance with ease.
4. Standardized Security Policies: Maintaining consistent security policies and best practices across all accounts ensured a unified security posture and reduced the risk of inconsistent security configurations.
5. Flexibility and Customisation: While AWS offers predefined policy templates, we customised SCPs to match their specific security requirements, adapting them to their unique needs.

Use Cases for HeyJobs

HeyJobs leveraged SCPs in various ways to enhance organisational security:

1. Restricting EC2 Instance Types: HeyJobs implemented an SCP that allowed developers in their development AWS account to launch only small EC2 instances for cost control and resource optimization.
2. Data Access Control: We used SCPs to control access to data services, ensuring that only authorized personnel could access critical information.
3. Resource Protection: SCPs were utilized to safeguard important AWS resources, preventing accidental modifications or deletions.
4. RestrictRegions: Limits the use of AWS services to specific, approved regions. This policy ensures that resources are created and managed only in the designated regions, helping maintain data sovereignty, compliance, and cost control within the organization.
5. Enforce Resource Tagging: This policy allowed the creation of resources by mandating specific tags, which improved resource management, organization, and cost allocation, while also improving security and compliance.

Conclusion

For HeyJobs, AWS Service Control Policies became a powerful tool to enhance organizational security. By implementing SCPs, we minimized risks, enforced compliance, and maintained consistent security standards across their entire AWS environment. Just as HeyJobs successfully used SCPs to overcome security challenges and improve their cloud infrastructure’s safety, your organisation can benefit from this powerful AWS feature.

Remember, security is an ever-evolving field, so regular reviews and updates to SCPs are crucial to staying ahead of changing security needs.

Also, Interested in joining our team? Browse our open positions or check out what we do at HeyJobs.