AWS Security Audit: Fixed-Price, Fixed-Scope

Why an AWS security audit comes before everything else

Most AWS incidents we read about are not exotic exploits. They are a public S3 bucket, an access key committed to a repository, an administrator without MFA, or a role that trusts far more than it should. AWS describes this as the shared responsibility model: AWS secures the cloud itself, and you are responsible for how you configure what you run in it. A security audit is the quickest way to find the configuration mistakes that fall on your side of that line, before you spend money on tools that assume the basics are in place.

What an AWS security audit is not

It is not a penetration test. An audit reviews configuration and permissions from the inside, with read-only access, and finds the weaknesses an attacker would use. A penetration test actively tries to exploit them. Most companies should audit first, fix the findings, and only then pay for a penetration test, otherwise the test spends its budget rediscovering the same misconfigurations. If you need the offensive side, see our AWS and Azure penetration testing. It is also not a compliance certification: we produce evidence and a gap list, and your auditor issues the attestation.

Our approach to AWS security audits

We review against the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark because it is specific, widely recognised and easy for auditors to follow. Where the benchmark is silent, we use AWS’s own security best practices and Well-Architected security pillar. Every finding gets a severity based on how easily it can be exploited and what it exposes, not on a generic score. Findings that are noisy but harmless are listed separately, so your team does not waste a sprint on them.

How an AWS security audit differs from turning on Security Hub

AWS Security Hub, AWS Config and GuardDuty are valuable, and we check whether you have them switched on and wired to someone who will read the alerts. But they are detection tools: they produce findings, often hundreds, without telling you which three matter this week. An AWS security audit adds judgement. We read the findings in the context of how your accounts are actually used, drop the ones that do not apply, and tell you the order to fix the rest. Teams that already run Security Hub usually get the most out of the audit, because the raw material is there and only the prioritisation is missing.

What a finding looks like in the report

Each finding states what we found, where, why it matters in plain language, how severe it is, how to fix it, and how to confirm the fix worked. For example, an IAM role whose trust policy allows any principal in another account to assume it would be listed with the role name, the risk (anyone able to act in that account could act as this role), the severity, the corrected trust policy, and a command to verify the change. You should never have to ask what a finding means.

Single account or multi-account

A single AWS account audit covers one account across all regions in use. If you run AWS Organizations with several accounts, the audit also covers the organisation itself: service control policies, centralised logging, delegated administrators and how accounts are separated. Multi-account scope takes about ten business days. See how our fixed-price cloud security consulting quotes work for what each scope includes.