Challenges

A leading financial institution needed a robust cloud governance model that would ensure continuous compliance with RBI regulations and internal audit standards across more than 40 AWS accounts. The key challenges included:

• Automating the deployment and configuration of AWS Config across all accounts and regions.
• Implementing multi-account compliance monitoring and central visibility through a single pane of glass.
• Developing custom compliance rules to meet internal tagging and data protection policies.
• Enabling secure auditing capabilities for the internal audit team.
• Maintaining encryption and configuration recording standards across all workloads.

Searce Solution

Searce designed and implemented a scalable, programmatic AWS Config deployment model to establish centralized compliance and governance across the client's AWS environment.

Key aspects of the solution included:

• Programmatic Config Deployment: Used AWS CloudFormation StackSets to automate Config setup and deploy over 25 managed Config rules (e.g., rds-storage-encrypted, iam-password-policy) across all accounts and
• Custom Compliance Rules: Authored and deployed five custom Config rules using the AWS Config Rule Development Kit (RDK) to monitor internal tagging, data protection, and resource access policies.
• Centralized Aggregation & Monitoring: Created an organization-based Config Aggregator in the Audit account to consolidate compliance data, power Advanced Queries, and provide unified visibility for all accounts.
• Configuration Recording & Encryption: Configured recorders to capture all supported resources, limited global resources to the primary ap-south-1 (Mumbai) Region, and delivered snapshots to a centralized, CMK-encrypted S3 bucket in the Audit account.
• Audit Enablement: Trained the audit team to use AWS Config Advanced Queries and CloudTrail Lookup API to correlate configuration changes with specific user actions, enhancing traceability.

Key Implementations & Benefits:

• Compliance Automation: Automated deployment of managed and custom Config rules ensured continuous enforcement of security baselines and RBI compliance standards, achieving 95% account coverage via StackSets, reducing manual checks by 90%, and continuously evaluating 150+ rules across 10 services.
• Centralized Governance: Implemented an organization-based Config Aggregator for unified compliance visibility across all the 18 AWS accounts, reducing reporting time from 3 days to under an hour, with full visibility into non-compliant resources.
• Improved Audit Efficiency: Enabled internal audit teams to perform on-demand compliance checks and correlate configuration changes with CloudTrail events, resulting in 60% faster audits, 70% less manual effort, and quicker root cause analysis.
• Data Security: Secured Config data and compliance snapshots through a centralized, CMK-encrypted S3 bucket, ensuring 100% data encryption at rest and 12-month snapshot retention policy.
• Scalable Governance Framework: Leveraged CloudFormation StackSets and RDK to enable the rapid onboarding of new accounts and rules without manual effort, reducing onboarding time to under 30 minutes and achieving 75% faster overall setup.

By leveraging AWS Config, Searce helped the client establish a secure, compliant, and fully automated AWS governance model leveraging AWS Config. The bank achieved real-time compliance visibility, streamlined audit readiness, and consistent enforcement of internal and RBI-mandated security controls across all AWS accounts. The result was an auditable, resilient, and future-ready cloud compliance framework that strengthened the client's overall security posture.