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FR-03 Cloud Security
Org-Wide AWS Security Hardening Program
GuardDutySecurity HubAWS ConfigCloudTrailS3 Public Access BlockIAM
35risks triaged (8 critical, 27 high)
59 → 80projected security-maturity score
6AWS accounts brought under monitoring
Architecture — illustrative, anonymized
01 The situation
- An external maturity assessment flagged dozens of findings, but they sat as a flat list — no owner, no order of operations, no cost, and no safe implementation path.
- None of the organization’s accounts had automated threat detection, configuration-change tracking, or compliance monitoring enabled; root activity was unmonitored and audit logging was unprotected.
- Several remediations were genuinely dangerous if done carelessly — e.g. an account-wide public-access block can silently 403 buckets that are public by design.
02 The approach
- Reconciled the external assessment against a fresh internal audit, resolving the discrepancies (controls marked "mitigated" that were in fact still open) before any work started.
- Wrote one self-contained proposal per fix — risk, affected accounts, AWS cost, engineering effort, exact order of operations, and rollback — so leadership could approve work in priority order.
- Sequenced the dangerous changes safely: investigate each resource, remediate the non-intentional cases at the resource level, document intentional exceptions, then apply org-wide guardrails last.
- Targeted the weakest pillars first — threat detection and identity — where each control closed multiple assessment findings at once.
03 The outcome
- A 35-risk backlog became an executable program; the critical-tier items plus in-flight work projected the maturity score from below-average into the 80s.
- Threat detection, configuration tracking, and protected audit logging brought online across all six accounts.
- Every change shipped with a written, cost-aware proposal — giving the organization an auditable security roadmap, not just a pile of fixes.
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