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PRESERVING OUR NATION'S HERITAGE

NARA’s Push for Stronger Cloud Governance

The Challenge

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) plays an invaluable role in preserving our country’s heritage. NARA holds custody of and provides access to the public records that trace the story of our nation, government, and the American people. As a result, the institution deals with vast amounts of data every day.

When NARA needed help improving record and email management throughout their organization, they implemented Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud solutions. However, a critical challenge soon emerged: dealing with a sprawling AWS footprint that decentralized access and put them at risk of non-compliance with federal cybersecurity standards.

NARA turned to ECS, an AWS Audited Managed Services Provider (MSP) and Premier Consulting Partner. The challenge: developing a centralized cloud governance and security solution, providing visibility into NARA’s AWS accounts, and ensuring compliance.

The ECS Approach

In choosing ECS as an AWS provider, NARA had two key goals:

  • Ensuring federal compliance regarding data collection, processing, logging, and storage.
  • Improving cybersecurity posture by centralizing oversight of AWS access.

While NARA possessed the in-house capabilities to maintain these programs, once they were in place, they needed support for the initial set-up and deployment. That’s where our AWS experts came in.

ECS’ cloud team developed a comprehensive cloud governance solution, built with AWS-native services and capabilities, that:

Leveraged Amazon CloudWatch logs and Amazon Kinesis to centralize AWS workloads and account logs for security information and event management (SIEM) analysis.

Provided insight into NARA’s cloud infrastructure.

Leveraged AWS Organizations Service Control Policies (SCPs), AWS Config, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to ensure compliance.

ECS simplified these solutions through automated templates powered by CloudFormation. This allowed for efficient onboarding of new AWS workloads and accounts into NARA’s enterprise.

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The Result

ECS’ solutions have enabled NARA to maintain governance oversight of their AWS footprint through low-cost, AWS-native services. Leveraging automation, NARA can quickly onboard new AWS workloads and accounts, meeting compliance standards and ensuring AWS best practices and baselines are met.

The result is a greatly reduced risk of noncompliance for NARA and a significantly improved cybersecurity posture. Thanks to the expertise and dedication of our professionals, NARA will move forward with less vulnerable and more cost-effective operations throughout the organization.

Ultimately, this will better position the institution to continue its unique and critical mission: strengthening our nation’s democracy through public access to high-value government records.

Are you ready to streamline and transform your operations with ECS Cloud Services?

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