2026 update — the fundamentals in this article still hold, but the tooling and the regulatory landscape have moved on. Read the inline notes for what changed.
Two of the AWS services described later (Amazon Inspector and Amazon Detective) are described in their 2020 form and are now out of date — Inspector was rebuilt in 2021 and Detective left preview in 2020. Beyond the tools, the regulations you must think about in 2026 are broader than they were: alongside the long-standing ones (SOC 2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR), most organizations now also have to account for newer and updated regimes such as the EU’s NIS2 and DORA (for financial entities), India’s DPDP Act, updated ISO/IEC 27001:2022, and NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. The good news is that the approach below — know your data, know who can access it, know where it lives, and prove it continuously — is exactly what all of these frameworks reward. The inline notes throughout this article bring the specifics up to date so you can act on 2026 facts, not 2020 ones.
Nowadays, Cloud compliance is one of the significant issues among users. Any organization that is using cloud services must make sure that they follow all the rules, laws, and regulations of the cloud so that their business runs smoothly and at a good pace.
And also, organizations need to ensure that they have a good understanding and knowledge about their data and their infrastructure.
All the issues related to cloud compliance come out when organizations start using cloud backup or storage services. When their data is being migrated from their internal storage to the cloud, it becomes essential to keep a close eye on how that data will be stored so that they can remain compliant with all kinds of business laws and regulations.
Moreover, AWS Cloud Compliance answers several questions that most users ask about how to accomplish and preserve cloud compliance within their organizations.
Enterprises are nowadays keen to take advantage of the safety and cost-cutting at a large scale that AWS cloud compliance offers. A set of laws and regulations across the industries and geographies can also vary and feels highly complex.
Nowadays, every guideline required enterprises to look after their informational and substantial assets. Furthermore, to do this, there is an implied ability to establish and organize:
- What type of information is going to be saved and stored on a system?
- Who has the right to access the system?
- Where is the information getting stored?
So, all of these cloud compliance questions turn out to be so much evident. So, let’s have a look at some of them:
Getting Started with AWS Audit
a repository of more than 350 audit controls mapped against several industry compliance standards
Laws and Regulations
All the users who are using cloud services will remain accountable for complying with the AWS cloud compliance regulations. Moreover, Amazon Web Services provides essential features such as legal agreements, security features, enablers such as Business Associate Agreement, and AWS Data Processing Agreement. These features are going to benefit a lot in supporting customer cloud compliance. It is also true that many requirements under the applicable rules and regulations may not be liable to attestation.
2026 update — this is the Shared Responsibility Model, and it is worth being precise about, because most compliance failures happen on the customer’s side of the line. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud: the physical data centers, hardware, and the managed infrastructure of its services. You, the customer, are responsible for security in the cloud: how you configure services, who you grant access to, how you encrypt and classify data, and how you monitor it. The legal agreements mentioned above matter for specific regimes — for example, you must have a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS before you put protected health information into AWS for HIPAA, and a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) for handling personal data under GDPR. A practical 2026 point: signing these agreements and using an “eligible” service does not make you compliant by itself. You still have to configure that service correctly (encryption on, access restricted, logging enabled), and only a defined subset of AWS services are in scope for each program — always check the service’s compliance eligibility for the standard you are pursuing.
Attestations and Certifications
Cloud compliance attestations and certifications are the evidence that revealed that something is true. They are even considered to be the third party, self-regulating auditor, and result in a certification, verification of compliance, or audit report.
2026 update — here is how to actually use AWS’s attestations and certifications, made concrete. AWS maintains an extensive set of third-party audit reports and certifications — SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 reports; ISO 27001, 27017, and 27018 certificates; PCI DSS Attestation of Compliance; FedRAMP authorizations; and many region- and industry-specific ones. You do not commission these yourself; you download them on demand from AWS Artifact and provide them to your own auditors to satisfy the “is the underlying cloud platform certified?” part of your audit. The key distinction to keep clear: AWS’s certification of its infrastructure covers only AWS’s responsibilities. Your own SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification still requires you to prove your workloads, access controls, and processes meet the standard. Use AWS’s attestations as a building block, then layer your own continuous evidence (from Security Hub CSPM, Config, and CloudTrail) on top.
Alignments and Frameworks
Compliance frameworks and alignments involve the available compliance or security requirements that have been published already for some the specific purposes.
AWS provides essential security, privacy features, and enablers that include mapping documents, playbooks, and whitepapers for these types of programs.
2026 update — how to turn a framework into something you can actually measure in AWS. A framework (CIS, NIST, PCI DSS) is a list of controls; the work is mapping each control to a technical check you can run continuously. In 2026 the practical path is:
- Pick your framework as a Security Hub CSPM standard. For CIS, PCI DSS, and NIST 800-53, Security Hub already ships the control mappings, so enabling the standard gives you a live compliance score and a list of failing controls without building anything. Teams that outgrew native and open-source scanners describe this shift in this case study on moving off AWS Trusted Advisor and open-source scanners to continuous CSPM, and in this one on building a custom compliance framework on CIS and NIST with CSPM.
- Fill gaps with AWS Config conformance packs. Where a control is specific to your organization, deploy it as a Config rule so any drift is detected automatically.
- Collect evidence continuously. Route CloudTrail, Config, and Security Hub data into durable storage so that when an auditor asks “prove this control was operating on this date,” you have the record. (If you are an existing AWS Audit Manager customer, its prebuilt frameworks automate this mapping-to-evidence step; new customers should assemble it from Security Hub and Config, since Audit Manager closes to new customers on April 30, 2026.)
- Do not treat one-time certification as done. All modern frameworks — and updated ones like ISO 27001:2022 and NIST CSF 2.0 — expect continuous control operation, which is why continuous posture management has replaced the annual manual audit as the baseline expectation.
The shift since this article was written is exactly this: from periodic, manual mapping to continuous, tool-driven measurement.
To be on the same, and to make sure that your business is fulfilling all the necessities of AWS Cloud Compliance, you need to know the areas of which you need to be aware. The first thing is that every organization needs to have a thorough understanding and knowledge about the type of cloud services that they use. Once the organizations are fully aware of their cloud service provider’s offerings, they can look at the data that they are going to move to the cloud.
For security purposes, it is always good to have all the critical and confidential data on an internal network and not move to the cloud. And if at any point in time, the data needs to be migrated to the cloud infrastructure, then it should be placed in a private cloud that is being hosted on the in-house premises. There, access to both the logical and physical infrastructure can be provided.
Some of the AWS cloud compliance enablers
AWS offers various services whose primary goal is to help organizations achieve and maintain their certification status. Organizations should use and leverage these services to simplify their complicated related efforts, which are required to keep their cloud environment.
Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty is a machine learning service that manages threat detection, monitors VPC flow logs, AWS CloudTrail, and DNS logs, and notifies any anomalies.
2026 update — GuardDuty now watches far more than those three log sources. The core description is still correct, but GuardDuty has expanded into a set of optional “protection plans” that cover Amazon S3 (malicious data access), Amazon EKS (Kubernetes audit logs and runtime), Amazon RDS (suspicious login activity), AWS Lambda, EC2 runtime malware scanning, and container runtime monitoring. It also added Extended Threat Detection, which correlates individual signals into multi-stage attack sequences rather than isolated alerts. For compliance, enable it from your AWS Organizations delegated administrator account so every member account is covered, and turn on the protection plans that match the data you actually run — the more sources GuardDuty sees, the stronger your continuous threat-detection evidence.
Amazon Inspector
Amazon Inspector is an Elastic Compute Cloud 2(EC2) agent that will help you to scan the EC2 instances for any of the threats and vulnerabilities. It will also help to monitor and track the traffic coming in and out from the EC2 instances.
2026 update — Amazon Inspector is no longer “an EC2 agent.” The service was completely rebuilt in November 2021. The description above matches the retired “Amazon Inspector Classic,” which required you to install an agent and run manual assessments. The current Amazon Inspector is an automated, continuous vulnerability management service. It uses the AWS Systems Manager agent that is already on most modern EC2 instances (so it is effectively agentless for you), and it scans three things continuously: EC2 instances, container images in Amazon ECR, and AWS Lambda functions. It re-scans automatically whenever a new CVE is published, and it assigns each finding a contextual risk score based on factors like internet reachability, so you fix the genuinely exploitable issues first. For compliance, this means you can continuously demonstrate that workloads are being scanned for known vulnerabilities rather than producing point-in-time reports.
Amazon Detective
Amazon Detective is a new service that relies on Machine Learning; it was announced at re: invent 2019, and while still, it is in beta preview. It helps the organizations to meet specific compliance standards.
2026 update — Amazon Detective is not “in beta preview.” It became generally available on March 31, 2020. Any AWS customer can enable it today; there is no preview sign-up. Detective automatically pulls together CloudTrail management events, VPC Flow Logs, GuardDuty findings, and EKS audit logs, and builds a linked graph of behavior across your accounts so you can investigate a security finding in a few clicks instead of writing manual log queries. It now also integrates with GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection to surface multi-step “attack sequence” findings. For compliance and audit purposes, Detective gives you a defensible, evidence-backed investigation trail when an incident occurs — useful for the incident-response requirements in standards like SOC 2, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001.
Amazon Macie
Amazon Macie is a machine learning service that continuously scans and analyses the data stored in the S3 buckets. This service can help to recognize sensitive data and offers a dashboard and notifications to track how the data is being stored.
2026 addition — the compliance tooling landscape has grown well beyond the four services listed above. Here are the ones that matter most for AWS compliance today.
When this article was written, GuardDuty, Inspector, Detective, and Macie were the headline services. In 2026 you should build your AWS compliance program around these, in roughly this order:
- AWS Security Hub CSPM — the service formerly called AWS Security Hub. This is the backbone of AWS compliance posture management. It continuously scores your environment against packaged standards including the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark (now v5.0), PCI DSS, NIST SP 800-53, and the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, and it aggregates findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, and Macie into one place. If you do only one thing for compliance, enable this.
- The new AWS Security Hub — launched to general availability on December 2, 2025. It sits on top of CSPM and correlates signals into prioritized risks and attack paths — the same idea behind a modern CNAPP — so your team spends time on what actually matters rather than triaging thousands of findings.
- AWS Config — records the configuration of every resource over time and evaluates it against rules. Conformance packs let you deploy a whole set of compliance rules (for HIPAA, PCI, and more) as a single unit, and Config gives you the historical “what did this resource look like on this date” evidence that auditors ask for.
- AWS Audit Manager — automates the collection of evidence mapped to frameworks like SOC 2, PCI DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA, turning audit prep from a manual scramble into a continuous process. Important caveat so you plan correctly: AWS has announced that Audit Manager will not be open to new customers starting April 30, 2026 — existing customers can keep using it, but if you are starting fresh in 2026, lean on Security Hub CSPM and Config conformance packs for continuous compliance rather than adopting Audit Manager.
- AWS Artifact — still the self-service portal for downloading AWS’s own audit reports (SOC, ISO, PCI) that you hand to your auditors to cover the “AWS side” of the shared responsibility model.
Two framing points that have not changed but are worth stating plainly: compliance in AWS is a shared responsibility (AWS secures the cloud; you secure what you put in it), and a tool collecting evidence is not the same as being compliant — you still need the policies, controls, and people behind them.
Wrapping up
Just signing up with a public cloud isn’t a silver bullet to your business requirements. You certainly have to ensure that your user’s data and their security are in compliance with the required standards.
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