Amazon Web Services provides several useful security tools as a starting point for any organization. So, here is various Tools AWS Gives to help you with compliance.
Here is a list of Various Compliance tools from AWS:
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Amazon GuardDuty
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Amazon Inspector
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Amazon Detective
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Amazon Macie
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AWS Artifacts
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AWS Config
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AWS Security Hub
2026 update — this list of seven services is still a solid starting point, but three of the descriptions below have materially changed since this article was written. Amazon Inspector was rebuilt in 2021, Amazon Detective left preview and became generally available in 2020, and “AWS Security Hub” now splits into two products (Security Hub CSPM and the new AWS Security Hub). Each section below carries an inline update explaining exactly what changed and what you should do now, so you can act on current facts rather than the original 2020 descriptions. Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Artifact, and AWS Config work broadly as described, though GuardDuty has since added protection plans for Amazon S3, Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS, Lambda, and malware, plus an Extended Threat Detection capability that correlates multi-step attacks.
Now let’s get an understanding of all this
Amazon GuardDuty
It is a continuous security monitoring service that identifies possible malicious activity within the AWS environments — the same class of problem addressed by cloud detection and response. It analyses Amazon CloudTrail and AWS VPC Flow Log Data to look for issues such as the use of exposed credentials, communication from malicious URLs, IPs or domains, and escalation of privileges. Amazon GuardDuty helps the AWS customers keep their AWS environment running with less interruption to their operations and ensures organization compliance with security standards. When the Amazon GuardDuty detects unexpected and potentially damaging behavior in your AWS environment, it displays alerts in the Amazon GuardDuty Management Console.
Amazon Inspector
Amazon Inspector is a service that helps automated security assessment to improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on Amazon Web Services. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for deviations from the best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector provides a detailed list of security findings by the level of security.
Amazon Inspector includes a knowledge base of various kinds of rules mapped to collective security best practices and vulnerabilities definitions. Some examples of built-in rules include checking for remote root login that is being enabled or vulnerable software versions installed.
2026 update — Amazon Inspector was completely rebuilt in November 2021, and the description above now refers to “Amazon Inspector Classic.”
The original version of Inspector described above worked on a manual, project-based model: you installed an Inspector agent on your EC2 instances, defined an assessment target, chose a rules package, and then ran an assessment that produced a point-in-time report. That model no longer reflects how the service works, and Amazon Inspector Classic has been deprecated.
The Amazon Inspector you use today is an automated, continuous vulnerability management service. Here is exactly what changed, so you do not have to assume anything:
- No manual scans. Inspector runs continuously in the background. The moment a new CVE is published or a new resource is deployed, it re-evaluates your environment automatically. You no longer schedule assessments or wait for a report.
- No standalone agent to install for most workloads. Inspector uses the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) agent, which is already present on most modern Amazon EC2 instances, so scanning EC2 is effectively agentless from your point of view. There is nothing extra to deploy for EC2, Lambda, or container images.
- Broader coverage. It scans three resource types today: Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Lambda functions (including their application dependencies), and container images stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR). It can also scan container images inside CI/CD tools before they are ever pushed.
- Contextual risk scoring. Instead of a flat severity label, Inspector calculates an Inspector risk score for each finding by combining the CVE’s own severity with real environmental context — for example, whether the affected resource is reachable from the internet. This lets you fix the genuinely exploitable issues first rather than chasing every finding.
- Native integration. Findings flow automatically into AWS Security Hub and Amazon EventBridge, so you can route them into ticketing, chat, or automated remediation.
What you should do: enable the current Amazon Inspector from the console (Inspector → Get started) and turn on the account-level scan types you need (EC2, ECR, Lambda). If you are in an AWS Organization, enable it from your delegated administrator account so every member account is covered. The old agent-and-assessment-template workflow is no longer the right approach.
Amazon Detective
Amazon Detective, an Amazon Web Services offering designed to help organizations analyze and visualize security data and identify security issues, is now being previewed to partners and customers. The company revealed the preview at the AWS re:invent 2019 conference in Nevada.
According to the company, Amazon Detective services start collecting log data as soon as it is enabled and provides visual summaries and analytics related to ingested data. It also offers comparisons of recent activity against historical baselines established after two weeks of account monitoring.
2026 update — Amazon Detective is no longer in preview. It became generally available on March 31, 2020, and has expanded significantly since.
The sentence above describing Detective as “now being previewed” was accurate when this article was first published, but it is outdated. Detective is a fully released, production-ready AWS service that any customer can enable. Here is the current, accurate picture:
- What it is. Amazon Detective automatically collects log data from your AWS resources — including AWS CloudTrail management events, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, Amazon GuardDuty findings, and Amazon EKS audit logs — and builds a linked, interactive graph model of the behavior in your accounts. You do not configure or maintain that data pipeline yourself; Detective ingests and correlates it for you.
- Why it matters for investigations. When GuardDuty raises a finding, Detective gives you a ready-made “finding profile” that shows the surrounding context — which IAM role or user was involved, what API calls they made, which IP addresses they used, and how that behavior compares to the account’s normal baseline. This turns an investigation that used to take hours of manual log queries into a few clicks.
- The two-week baseline still applies. Detective builds its behavioral baseline from historical activity, so its comparisons become more useful after it has observed a couple of weeks of data. That part of the original description is still correct.
- Newer capabilities. Detective now integrates with GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection to surface multi-step “attack sequence” findings, and it supports investigations across security findings from multiple sources rather than GuardDuty alone.
What you should do: enable Detective from the console in the same account (ideally the delegated administrator account for an AWS Organization) where you run GuardDuty, so the two services reinforce each other. There is no preview sign-up or approval step anymore — it is available on demand.
Amazon Macie
Amazon Macie is a fully managed security service that continuously monitors the data in the AWS environment based on the file type, content type, regular expression, etc., set by the IT administrator. It uses machine learning to classify, discover, and protect sensitive information in AWS. It offers dashboards and alerts by which an admin knows how the data is being accessed. It can also discover and report the occurrence of various essential files like the PEM key in an S3 Bucket, or a publicly accessible S3 Bucket. As of now, AWS Macie is available for S3 in a few AWS Regions.
2026 update — Macie is no longer limited to “a few AWS Regions,” and it was re-engineered in May 2020 with a much lower, more predictable price.
The closing line above (“available for S3 in a few AWS Regions”) reflects the early version of Macie and is now outdated. Do not assume Macie is a niche, region-limited tool — it is a mainstream, broadly available service. Here is the current, accurate picture so you can plan around it with confidence:
- Wide regional availability. In May 2020 AWS relaunched Macie, expanded it to 17 Regions at once, and has continued adding Regions since. For practical purposes you should assume Macie is available in the commercial Regions you are likely using; confirm the exact list on the AWS Regional Services page rather than relying on “a few.”
- How it works today. Macie continuously and automatically evaluates the security and access posture of your S3 buckets (public access, encryption, sharing) and, on top of that, runs machine-learning-based sensitive data discovery jobs that find and classify data such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and credentials. It ships with managed data identifiers for common sensitive data types, and you can define custom identifiers with your own regular expressions.
- The pricing model changed completely. The relaunch cut Macie’s price by roughly 80% or more and moved to a two-part model: (1) a charge based on the number of S3 buckets evaluated for posture, and (2) a charge based on the amount of data inspected during sensitive data discovery. There is a 30-day free trial for bucket evaluation and a recurring free allotment of data processing each month. This matters because the old Macie had a reputation for being expensive — that objection no longer holds.
- Why it helps compliance. Because Macie tells you where your regulated data actually lives and whether those locations are exposed, it directly supports data security requirements under regimes like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, where you must be able to locate and safeguard sensitive data.
What you should do: enable Macie, let it complete bucket evaluation, then scope sensitive data discovery jobs to the buckets that are most likely to hold regulated data first (to keep costs controlled) before widening coverage.
AWS Artifacts
AWS Artifact is a dashboard-type portal that offers enterprises full access to compliance and security reports, which will be implemented in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.
AWS artifacts provide reports that can act as a proper guide to other colleagues and team members, including all developers, thus ensuring all necessary standards are being followed.
A few examples of reports are Service Organization Control and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
All such reports are classified by the AWS as artifacts and further grouped into two categories: confidential and public. Public Artifacts are accessible across all the AWS accounts, whereas some of the confidential artifacts mainly require the approval of Amazon and may also require the customer or user to first sign in as a non-disclosure agreement before receiving the report.
The admin also has the authority to decide whether to restrict or distribute the artifact’s access with the help of AWS permissions for the Identity and Access Management.
AWS Config
AWS Config is also a fully managed service that offers a detailed view of the resources associated with your AWS account, which include how they are being configured, how they are being related to one another, and how the different configurations and their relationships have to keep on changing over a while.
AWS Config uses the Amazon Simple Notification Service to stream configuration changes and notifications. Config uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to stir configuration items; they are delivered in a configuration stream. Permissions to the AWS Config service are managed via AWS IAM. All AWS Config API calls are logged with the help of a CloudTRail.
At the time of setting up AWS Config, you can configure settings such as turning on/off Config recording, which AWS resources are data retention, recorded, S3 bucket, IAM Role, SNS Topic, and S3 Bucket.
AWS Security Hub
AWS Security Hub is a one-stop-shop for users to monitor and manage security alerts and compliance information coming from a wide range of cloud services, has graduated from preview status, becoming generally available. AWS revealed the tool in December 2019, in the wake of a bevy of security breaches affecting customers who did not configure their Amazon S3 storage buckets correctly. While not the fault of the Amazon Web Services platform, the company has stepped up its security initiatives, previously adding controls to block out public access to S3 storage buckets.
2026 update — the description above is still correct, but “AWS Security Hub” now refers to two related things, and you need to know which one you are turning on.
The Security Hub described above (the December 2019 release) has been renamed AWS Security Hub CSPM, reflecting its role as a cloud security posture management tool. Everything the original paragraph says about it remains true — it aggregates findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, and dozens of partner tools, and it runs automated security standards checks such as the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, PCI DSS, and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. AWS has kept investing in it; for example, it now supports the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark v5.0 and added an AI security best-practices standard in 2026. If you have been using Security Hub for compliance posture checks, that capability lives on under the “CSPM” name.
On top of that, AWS launched a new AWS Security Hub experience, previewed at re:Inforce in June 2025 and made generally available on December 2, 2025. It sits above Security Hub CSPM and the other security services and focuses on risk prioritization and response, not just aggregation. The key differences, stated plainly so you can choose correctly:
- Correlation instead of a flat list. The original Security Hub (CSPM) gives you a large list of findings. The new Security Hub correlates and enriches signals across services — for example, linking a vulnerability, an exposed resource, and suspicious activity into a single “exposure” — so you can see an attack path rather than isolated alerts.
- Near-real-time analytics. It continuously analyzes incoming signals and highlights the issues that represent genuine risk to your environment, which cuts down the alert fatigue that comes from triaging thousands of undifferentiated findings.
- It builds on CSPM, it does not replace it. You still enable Security Hub CSPM (and the underlying services like GuardDuty, Inspector, and Macie) to generate findings; the new Security Hub then prioritizes them. Think of CSPM as the detection layer and the new Security Hub as the prioritization-and-response layer.
What you should do: if your goal is compliance-standard scoring (CIS, PCI DSS, FSBP), enable Security Hub CSPM. If you also want correlated, prioritized risk and a single place to run your security operations, enable the new AWS Security Hub on top of it. Both are generally available today — neither is in preview.
How can Cloudanix help?
Cloudanix is your Ops Dashboard which cuts across all these tools and several others and gives you a single swiss-knife for your Ops needs. Teams have made exactly this move in practice, from moving off AWS Trusted Advisor and open-source scanners to continuous CSPM to going from native and open-source tools to a correlated CNAPP for a lean security team. Use the free trial and check it out for yourself.
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