In2 Scales Securely with AWS Cloud Operations: Governance, Observability, Compliance, and Financial Optimization

AWS Cloud Operations Competency 
Client: In2
Domain: AWS Cloud Operations
Pattern: Governance, Compliance, Observability, and Operations with AWS CloudOps across Multi-Account Setup

1. Executive Summary

In2, a rapidly growing consultancy and solutions provider, required a secure, governed, and production-ready AWS environment to host its digital workloads. Their previous infrastructure lacked governance, automation, and observability, leading to operational inefficiencies and compliance risks.

With the expertise of Atomic Computing, In2 adopted a multi-account AWS Control Tower landing zone, implemented infrastructure automation via Terraform, enhanced monitoring with CloudWatch, and deployed robust compliance guardrails with AWS Config and CloudTrail.

This modernization enabled In2 to achieve scalable operations, proactive monitoring, and continuous compliance, while aligning with AWS Cloud Operations Competency pillars.

2. Challenges

Before migration, In2 faced several hurdles:

• Limited Governance: No structured multi-account framework or automated controls.
  
• Manual Deployments: Infrastructure changes were time-consuming and prone to human error.
  
• Weak Observability: Minimal logging and monitoring across workloads.
  
• Compliance Gaps: Lack of audit-ready records for configuration and activity tracking.
  
• Operational Inefficiency: No automation for patching or operational tasks.

3. Solution – Aligned against CloudOps Competency Pillars

1. Cloud Governance Controls

• Deployed AWS Control Tower Landing Zone with dedicated Management, Staging, and Production accounts.
  
• Enabled Control Tower Managed Guardrails for baseline security and governance:
  
  • Detective Guardrails: Detect public S3 buckets, unrestricted SSH/RDP access, root user activity.
    
  • Preventive Guardrails: Prevent deletion of centralized CloudTrail logs, enforce MFA for root accounts, enforce encryption at rest for RDS.
    
• Governance extended with custom Service Control Policies (SCPs) to restrict region usage and ensure tagging compliance.
  

2. Financial Management Practices

• Consolidated billing enabled with AWS Organizations, providing a single view of spend across staging and production.
  
• Cost allocation tags (environment, workload, owner) activated for granular tracking.
  
• AWS Budgets with cost anomaly detection and alerts configured, ensuring proactive financial governance.
  
• Weekly Billing Alerts in Slack using custom implementation of AWS Lambda Function, Cost Explorer API and Webhook APIs.

3. Monitoring and Observability Solutions

• Amazon CloudWatch Metrics & Alarms configured for EC2, RDS, and ALB.
  
• CloudWatch Logs Insights used for centralized application and infrastructure log analysis.
  
• VPC Flow Logs enabled for network visibility.
  
• CloudTrail continuously records API activity for security investigations.
  
• Proactive alerting with SNS notifications, reducing downtime risks.

4. Compliance and Auditing Capabilities

• AWS Config enabled across all accounts to track configuration drift.
  
• Key AWS Config Rules applied:
  
  • restricted-ssh – Detect unrestricted SSH access.
    
  • rds-storage-encrypted – Ensure encryption of database storage.
    
  • iam-user-mfa-enabled – Enforce MFA for IAM users.
    
• Compliance data aggregated and retained centrally in a Log Archive S3 bucket.
  
• Quarterly compliance reports generated via AWS Config conformance packs.

5. Operations Management Processes

• Terraform adopted for IaC to standardize provisioning and decommissioning.
  
• AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager automated patching of Amazon Linux and Windows instances.
  
• Change management process integrated with Jira for approvals, testing, and deployment tracking.
  
• Regular Well-Architected Framework Reviews conducted to identify and remediate high-risk issues (HRIs).

4. Quantitative Business Impact

5. Outcomes

• Improved Governance: Multi-account setup with automated preventive & detective guardrails.
  
• Cost Transparency: Consolidated billing and proactive budget alerts.
  
• Enhanced Observability: Full monitoring stack with metrics, logs, and flow logs.
  
• Continuous Compliance: Automated checks and reporting with AWS Config and CloudTrail.
  
• Operational Excellence: IaC automation, patching, and structured change management reduced human error.

6. AWS Services Used

• Governance: AWS Control Tower, AWS Organizations, SCPs
  
• Financials: AWS Budgets, Cost Explorer, Anomaly Detection
  
• Observability: CloudWatch (Logs, Metrics, Alarms, Insights), VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail
  
• Compliance: AWS Config, Conformance Packs, centralized S3 log archive
  
• Operations: Terraform, AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, Jira Integration