AWS CloudFormation Guard – A powerful tool to create an environment of innovation with minimal risk

AWS CloudFormation Guard – A powerful tool to create an environment of innovation while avoiding cost overruns, security vulnerabilities, and compliance violations.

One of the promises of moving to an AWS cloud environment is to enable businesses to innovate quickly. Traditional hosting environments that required long procurement processes for access to new IT resources stifled the ability for organizations to experiment with new ideas. The dynamic and ondemand nature of the AWS cloud environment enables businesses to experiment with streamlining their existing processes, offer their customers new features, or even go into other lines of business with little financial risk. If the experiment fails, you simply shut off the resources. 

This freedom does come at some risk of potentially unexpected huge AWS bills, security holes from improperly configured resources, and/or compliance violations. For example, when businesses move to AWS it’s important to have a FinOps (financial operations) practice incorporated into their new processes. One of the roles of the FinOps group is to monitor and maintain costs within their AWS environment without recreating the same stifling set of practices that existed prior to moving to the cloud. AWS CloudFormation Guard enables creating a set of rules to keep controls in place for protecting the organization from out of control cost fluctuation while still enabling the business units the flexibility of simple and fast innovation. The security and compliance teams can also create a set of rules to ensure the businesses best practices are followed for all experimentation, avoiding the pitfalls and risks of an unrestricted environment. 

This is a really exciting development in providing more control and visibility into what can become a single source of truth for an organizations compliant, valid infrastructure definitions while maintaining that promise of innovation.