3.2. Compliance and Governance for Networks

Network compliance and governance are crucial for ensuring that your AWS network infrastructure adheres to legal, regulatory, and internal organizational standards. This is about defining, enforcing, and auditing network configurations. This section explores how AWS services can help you establish a robust framework for network compliance and governance at scale.

Scenario: You need to ensure that all VPC configurations (e.g., no public S3 buckets) in your organization's AWS accounts comply with strict internal security policies and regulatory requirements. You also need to audit all network changes.

💡 First Principle: Network compliance and governance fundamentally ensure that network configurations adhere to security policies and regulatory standards, enabling auditability and proactive enforcement across your cloud environment. This is critical for data protection and operational integrity.

You will learn about AWS Config for compliance, AWS Organizations for governance, and network auditing tools.

The focus is on remembering and understanding how to implement these concepts for a well-controlled and auditable network, which is crucial for the ANS-C01 exam.

⚠️ Common Pitfall: Treating compliance as a one-time audit event rather than a continuous process. Configuration drift can quickly lead to non-compliance if not continuously monitored.

Key Trade-Offs:

• Strict Governance vs. Developer Agility: Very strict governance policies can sometimes slow down development. The goal is to automate governance to minimize friction while ensuring compliance.

Reflection Question: How do network compliance and governance mechanisms (e.g., AWS Config, AWS Organizations) fundamentally ensure that network configurations adhere to security policies and regulatory standards, enabling auditability and proactive enforcement across your cloud environment?