Understanding AWS Audit Manager concepts and terminology

To help you get started, this page defines terms and explains some of the key concepts of AWS Audit Manager.

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Assessment

You can use an Audit Manager assessment to automatically collect evidence that’s relevant for an audit.

An assessment is based on a framework, which is a grouping of controls that are related to your audit. You can create an assessment from a standard framework or a custom framework. Standard frameworks contain prebuilt control sets that support a specific compliance standard or regulation. In contrast, custom frameworks contain controls that you can customize and group according to your specific audit requirements. Using a framework as a starting point, you can create an assessment that specifies the AWS accounts that you want to include in the scope of your audit.

When you create an assessment, Audit Manager automatically starts to assess resources in your AWS accounts based on the controls that are defined in the framework. Next, it collects the relevant evidence and converts it into an auditor-friendly format. After doing this, it then attaches the evidence to the controls in your assessment. When it's time for an audit, you—or a delegate of your choice—can review the collected evidence and then add it to an assessment report. This assessment report helps you to demonstrate that your controls are working as intended.

Evidence collection is an ongoing process that starts when you create your assessment. You can stop evidence collection by changing the assessment status to inactive. Alternatively, you can stop evidence collection at the control level. You can do this by changing the status of a specific control within your assessment to inactive.

For instructions on how to create and manage assessments, see Managing assessments in AWS Audit Manager.

Assessment report

An assessment report is a finalized document that's generated from an Audit Manager assessment. These reports summarize the relevant evidence that's collected for your audit. They link to the relevant evidence folders. The folders are named and organized according to the controls that are specified in your assessment. For each assessment, you can review the evidence that Audit Manager collects, and decide which evidence you want to include in the assessment report.

To learn more about assessment reports, see Assessment reports. To learn how to generate an assessment report, see Preparing an assessment report in AWS Audit Manager.

Assessment report destination

An assessment report destination is the default S3 bucket where Audit Manager saves your assessment reports. To learn more, see Configuring your default assessment report destination.

Audit

An audit is an independent examination of the assets, operations, or business integrity of your organization. An information technology (IT) audit specifically examines the controls within the information systems of your organization. The goal of an IT audit is to determine if information systems safeguard assets, operate effectively, and maintain data integrity. All of these are important to meeting the regulatory requirements that are mandated by a compliance standard or regulation.

Audit owner

The term audit owner has two different meanings depending on the context.

In the context of Audit Manager, an audit owner is a user or role that manages an assessment and its related resources. The responsibilities of this Audit Manager persona include creating assessments, reviewing evidence, and generating assessment reports. Audit Manager is a collaborative service, and audit owners benefit when other stakeholders participate in their assessments. For example, you can add other audit owners to your assessment to share management tasks. Or, if you’re an audit owner and you need help interpreting the evidence that was collected for a control, you can delegate that control set to a stakeholder who has subject matter expertise in that area. Such a person is known as a delegate persona.

In business terms, an audit owner is someone who coordinates and oversees the audit readiness efforts of their company, and presents evidence to an auditor. Typically, this is a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) professional, such as a Compliance Officer or a GDPR Data Protection Officer. GRC professionals have the expertise and authority to manage audit preparation. More specifically, they understand compliance requirements, and can analyze, interpret, and prepare reporting data. However, other business roles can also assume the Audit Manager persona of an audit owner—not only GRC professionals take on this role. For example, you might choose to have your Audit Manager assessments set up and managed by a technical expert from one of the following teams:

• SecOps

• IT/DevOps

• Security Operations Center/Incident Response

• Similar teams that own, develop, remediate, and deploy cloud assets, and understand the cloud infrastructure of your organization

Who you choose to assign as an audit owner in your Audit Manager assessment depends greatly on your organization. It also depends on how you structure your security operations and the specifics of the audit. In Audit Manager, the same individual can assume the audit owner persona in one assessment, and the delegate persona in another.

No matter how you choose to use Audit Manager, you can manage the separation of duties across your organization using the audit owner/delegate persona and granting specific IAM policies to each user. Through this two-step approach, Audit Manager ensures that you have full control over all of the specifics of an individual assessment. For more information, see Recommended policies for user personas in AWS Audit Manager.

AWS managed source

An AWS managed source is an evidence source that AWS maintains for you.

Each AWS managed source is a predefined grouping of data sources that maps to a specific common control or core control. When you use a common control as an evidence source, you automatically collect evidence for all the core controls that support that common control. You can also use individual core controls as an evidence source.

Whenever an AWS managed source is updated, the same updates are automatically applied to all custom controls that use that AWS managed source. This means that your custom controls collect evidence against the latest definitions of that evidence source. This helps you to ensure continuous compliance as the cloud compliance environment changes.

See also: customer managed source, evidence source.

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Changelog

For each control in an assessment, Audit Manager tracks user activity for that control. You can then review an audit trail of activities that are related to a specific control. For more information about which user activities are captured in the changelog, see Changelog tab.

Cloud compliance

Cloud compliance is the general principle that cloud-delivered systems must be compliant with the standards that are faced by cloud customers.

Common control

See control.

Compliance regulation

A compliance regulation is a law, rule, or other order that's prescribed by an authority, typically to regulate conduct. One example is GDPR.

Compliance standard

A compliance standard is a structured set of guidelines that detail the processes of an organization for maintaining accordance with established regulations, specifications, or legislation. Examples include PCI DSS and HIPAA.

Control

A control is a safeguard or countermeasure that’s prescribed for an information system or an organization. Controls are designed to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your information, and to meet a set of defined requirements. They provide an assurance that your resources are operating as intended, your data is reliable, and your organization is compliant with applicable laws and regulations.

In Audit Manager, a control can also represent a question in a vendor risk assessment questionnaire. In this case, a control is a specific question that asks information about an organization’s security and compliance posture.

Controls collect evidence continually when they’re active in your Audit Manager assessments. You can also manually add evidence to any control. Each piece of evidence is a record that helps you to demonstrate compliance with the control’s requirements.

Audit Manager provides the following types of controls:

Control type	Description
Common control	You can think of a common control as an action that helps you to fulfill a control objective. Because common controls aren’t specific to any compliance standard, they help you to collect evidence that can support a range of overlapping compliance obligations. For example, let's say you have a control objective called Data classification and handling. To fulfill this objective, you could implement a common control called Access controls to monitor and detect unauthorized access to your resources. Automated common controls collect evidence for you. They consist of a grouping of one or more related core controls. In turn, each of these core controls automatically collects relevant evidence from a predefined group of AWS data sources. AWS manages these underlying data sources for you, and updates them whenever regulations and standards change and new data sources are identified. Manual common controls require you to upload your own evidence. This is because they typically require the provision of physical records, or details about events that happen outside of your AWS environment. For this reason, there are often no AWS data sources that can produce evidence to support the manual common control’s requirements. You can’t edit a common control. However, you can use any common control as an evidence source when you create a custom control.
Core control	This is a prescriptive guideline for your AWS environment. You can think of a core control as an action that helps you to meet the requirements of a common control. For example, let's say you use a common control called Access controls to monitor unauthorized access to your resources. To support this common control, you could use the core control called Block public read access in S3 buckets. Because core controls aren’t specific to any compliance standard, they collect evidence that can support a range of overlapping compliance obligations. Each core control uses one or more data sources to collect evidence about a specific AWS service. AWS manages these underlying data sources for you, and updates them whenever regulations and standards change and new data sources are identified. You can’t edit a core control. However, you can use any core control as an evidence source when you create a custom control.
Standard control	This is a prebuilt control that Audit Manager provides. You can use standard controls to assist you with audit preparation for a specific compliance standard. Each standard control is related to a specific standard framework in Audit Manager, and collects evidence that you can use to demonstrate compliance with that framework. Standard controls collect evidence from underlying data sources that AWS manages. These data sources are automatically updated whenever regulations and standards change and new data sources are identified. You can’t edit standard controls. However, you can make an editable copy of any standard control.
Custom control	This is a control that you create in Audit Manager to meet your specific compliance requirements. You can create a custom control from scratch, or make an editable copy of an existing standard control. When you create a custom control, you can define specific evidence sources that determine where Audit Manager collects evidence from. After you create a custom control, you can edit that control or add it to a custom framework. You can also make an editable copy of any custom control.

Control domain

You can think of a control domain as a category of controls that’s not specific to any compliance standard. An example of a control domain is Data protection.

Controls are often grouped by domain for simple organizational purposes. Each domain has multiple objectives.

Control domain groupings are one of the most powerful features of the Audit Manager dashboard. Audit Manager highlights the controls in your assessments that have non-compliant evidence, and groups them by control domain. This enables you to focus your remediation efforts on specific subject domains as you prepare for an audit.

Control objective

A control objective describes the goal of the common controls that fall underneath it. Each objective can have multiple common controls. If these common controls are implemented successfully, they’ll help you to fulfill the objective.

Each control objective falls under a control domain. For example, the Data protection control domain might have a control objective named Data classification and handling. To support this control objective, you could use a common control called Access controls to monitor and detect unauthorized access to your resources.

Core control

See control.

Custom control

See control.

Customer managed source

A customer managed source is an evidence source that you define.

When you create a custom control in Audit Manager, you can use this option to create your own individual data sources. This gives you the flexibility to collect automated evidence from a business-specific resource, such as a custom AWS Config rule. You can also use this option if you want to add manual evidence to your custom control.

When you use customer managed sources, you are responsible for maintaining all of the data sources that you create.

See also: AWS managed source, evidence source.

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Data source

Audit Manager uses data sources to collect evidence for a control. A data source has the following properties:

• A data source type defines which type of data source Audit Manager collects evidence from.

  • For automated evidence, the type can be AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, or AWS API calls.

  • If you upload your own evidence, the type is Manual.

  • The Audit Manager API refers to a data source type as a sourceType.

• A data source mapping is a keyword that pinpoints where evidence is collected from for a given data source type.

  • For example, this might be the name of a CloudTrail event or the name of an AWS Config rule.

  • The Audit Manager API refers to a data source mapping as a sourceKeyword.

• A data source name labels the pairing of a data source type and mapping.

  • For standard controls, Audit Manager provides a default name.

  • For custom controls, you can provide your own name.

  • The Audit Manager API refers to a data source name as a sourceName.

A single control can have multiple data source types and multiple mappings. For example, one control might collect evidence from a mixture of data source types (such as AWS Config and Security Hub). Another control might have AWS Config as its only data source type, with multiple AWS Config rules as mappings.

The following table lists the automated data source types and shows examples of some corresponding mappings.

Data source type	Description	Mapping example
AWS Security Hub	Use this data source type to capture a snapshot of your resource security posture. Audit Manager uses the name of a Security Hub control as the mapping keyword, and reports the result of that security check directly from Security Hub.	EC2.1
AWS Config	Use this data source type to capture a snapshot of your resource security posture. Audit Manager uses the name of an AWS Config rule as the mapping keyword, and reports the result of that rule check directly from AWS Config.	SNS_ENCRYPTED_KMS
AWS CloudTrail	Use this data source type to track a specific user activity that's needed in your audit. Audit Manager uses the name of a CloudTrail event as the mapping keyword, and collects the related user activity from your CloudTrail logs.	CreateAccessKey
AWS API calls	Use this data source type to take a snapshot of your resource configuration through an API call to a specific AWS service. Audit Manager uses the name of API call as the mapping keyword, and collects the API response.	kms_ListKeys

Delegate

A delegate is an AWS Audit Manager user with limited permissions. Delegates typically have specialized business or technical expertise. For example, these expertise might be in data retention policies, training plans, network infrastructure, or identity management. Delegates help audit owners review collected evidence for controls that are in their area of expertise. Delegates can review control sets and their related evidence, add comments, upload additional evidence, and update the status of each of the controls that you assign to them for review.

Audit owners assign specific control sets to delegates, not entire assessments. As a result, delegates have limited access to assessments. For instructions on how to delegate a control set, see Delegations in AWS Audit Manager.

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Evidence

Evidence is a record that contains the information that's needed to demonstrate compliance with a control's requirements. Examples of evidence include a change activity invoked by a user, and a system configuration snapshot.

There are two main types of evidence in Audit Manager: automated evidence and manual evidence.

Evidence type	Description
Automated evidence	This is the evidence that Audit Manager collects automatically. This includes the following three categories of automated evidence: Compliance check — The result of a compliance check is captured from AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, or both. Examples of compliance checks include a security check result from Security Hub for a PCI DSS control, and an AWS Config rule evaluation for a HIPAA control. For more information, see AWS Config Rules supported by AWS Audit Manager and AWS Security Hub controls supported by AWS Audit Manager. User activity— User activity that changes a resource configuration is captured from CloudTrail logs as that activity occurs. Examples of user activities include a route table update, an Amazon RDS instance backup setting change, and an S3 bucket encryption policy change. For more information, see AWS CloudTrail event names supported by AWS Audit Manager. Configuration data — A snapshot of the resource configuration is captured directly from an AWS service on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Examples of configuration snapshots include a list of routes for a VPC route table, an Amazon RDS instance backup setting, and an S3 bucket encryption policy. For more information, see AWS API calls supported by AWS Audit Manager.
Manual evidence	This is the evidence that you add to Audit Manager yourself. There are three ways to add your own evidence: Import a file from Amazon S3 Upload a file from your browser Enter a text response to a risk assessment question For more information, see Adding manual evidence in AWS Audit Manager.

Automated evidence collection starts when you create an assessment. This is an ongoing process, and Audit Manager collects evidence at different frequencies depending on the evidence type and the underlying data source. For more information, see Understanding how AWS Audit Manager collects evidence.

For instructions on how to review evidence in an assessment, see Reviewing evidence in AWS Audit Manager.

Evidence source

An evidence source defines where a control collects evidence from. It can be an individual data source, or a predefined grouping of data sources that maps to a common control or a core control.

When you create a custom control, you can collect evidence from AWS managed sources, customer managed sources, or both.

Tip

We recommend that you use AWS managed sources. Whenever an AWS managed source is updated, the same updates are automatically applied to all custom controls that use these sources. This means that your custom controls always collect evidence against the latest definitions of that evidence source. This helps you to ensure continuous compliance as the cloud compliance environment changes.

See also: AWS managed source, customer managed source.

Evidence collection method

There are two ways that a control can collect evidence.

Evidence collection method	Description
Automated	Automated controls automatically collect evidence from AWS data sources. This automated evidence can help you to demonstrate full or partial compliance with the control.
Manual	Manual controls require you to upload your own evidence to demonstrate compliance with the control.

Note

You can attach manual evidence to any automated control. In many cases, a combination of automated and manual evidence is needed to demonstrate full compliance with a control. Although Audit Manager can provide automated evidence that’s helpful and relevant, some automated evidence might only demonstrate partial compliance. In this case, you can supplement the automated evidence that Audit Manager provides with your own evidence.

For example:

• The AWS Generative AI Best Practices Framework v2 contains a control called Error analysis. This control requires you to identify when inaccuracies are detected in your model usage. It also requires you to conduct a thorough error analysis to understand the root causes and take corrective action.

• To support this control, Audit Manager collects automated evidence that shows if CloudWatch alarms are enabled for the AWS account where your assessment is running. You can use this evidence to demonstrate partial compliance with the control by proving that your alarms and checks are configured correctly.

• To demonstrate full compliance, you can supplement the automated evidence with manual evidence. For example, you can upload a policy or a procedure that shows your error analysis process, your thresholds for escalations and reporting, and the results of your root cause analysis. You can use this manual evidence to demonstrate that established policies are in place, and that corrective action was taken when prompted.

For a more detailed example, see Controls with mixed data sources.

Export destination

An export destination is the default S3 bucket where Audit Manager saves the files that you export from evidence finder. For more information, see Configuring your default export destination for evidence finder.

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Framework

An Audit Manager framework structures and automate assessments for a specific standard or risk governance principle. These frameworks include a collection of prebuilt or customer defined controls, and they help you to map your AWS resources to the requirements of these controls.

There are two types of framework in Audit Manager.

Framework type	Description
Standard framework	This is a prebuilt framework that is based on AWS best practices for various compliance standards and regulations. You can use standard frameworks to assist with audit preparation for a specific compliance standard or regulation, such as PCI DSS or HIPAA.
Custom framework	This is a customized frameworks that you define as an Audit Manager user. You can use custom frameworks to assist with audit preparation according to your specific GRC requirements.

For instructions on how to create and manage frameworks, see Using the framework library to manage frameworks in AWS Audit Manager.

Note

AWS Audit Manager assists in collecting evidence that's relevant for verifying compliance with specific compliance standards and regulations. However, it doesn't assess your compliance itself. The evidence that's collected through AWS Audit Manager therefore might not include all the information about your AWS usage that's needed for audits. AWS Audit Manager isn't a substitute for legal counsel or compliance experts.

Framework sharing

You can use the Sharing a custom framework in AWS Audit Manager feature to quickly share your custom frameworks across AWS accounts and Regions. To share a custom framework, you create a share request. The recipient then has 120 days to accept or decline the request. When they accept, Audit Manager replicates the shared custom framework into their framework library. In addition to replicating the custom framework, Audit Manager also replicates any custom control sets and controls that are contained within that framework. These custom controls are added to the recipient’s control library. Audit Manager doesn’t replicate standard frameworks or controls. This is because these resources are already available by default in each account and Region.

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Resource

A resource is a physical or information asset that's assessed in an audit. Examples of AWS resources include Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon VPC subnets.

Resource assessment

A resource assessment is the process of assessing an individual resource. This assessment is based on the requirement of a control. While an assessment is active, Audit Manager runs resource assessments for each individual resource in the scope of the assessment. A resource assessment runs the following set of tasks:

1. Collects evidence including resource configurations, event logs, and findings

2. Translates and maps evidence to controls

3. Stores and tracks the lineage of evidence to enable integrity

Resource compliance

Resource compliance refers to the evaluation status of a resource that was assessed when collecting compliance check evidence.

Audit Manager collects compliance check evidence for controls that use AWS Config and Security Hub as a data source type. Multiple resources might be assessed during this evidence collection. As a result, a single piece of compliance check evidence can include one or more resources.

You can use the Resource compliance filter in evidence finder to explore compliance status at the resource level. After your search is complete, you can then preview the resources that matched your search query.

In evidence finder, there are three possible values for resource compliance:

Value	Description
Non-compliant	This refers to resources with compliance check issues. This happens if Security Hub reports a Fail result for the resource, or if AWS Config reports a Non-compliant result.
Compliant	This refers to resources that don’t have compliance check issues. This happens if Security Hub reports a Pass result for the resource, or if AWS Config reports a Compliant result.
Inconclusive	This refers to resources for which a compliance check isn’t available or applicable. This happens if AWS Config or Security Hub is the underlying data source type, but those services aren't enabled. This also happens if the underlying data source type doesn't support compliance checks (such as manual evidence, AWS API calls, or CloudTrail).

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Service in scope

Audit Manager manages which AWS services are in scope for your assessments. If you have an older assessment, it’s possible that you manually specified the services in scope in the past. After June 04, 2024, you can’t manually specify or edit services in scope.

A service in scope is an AWS service that your assessment collects evidence about. When a service is included in the scope of your assessment, Audit Manager assesses that service's resources. Some example resources include the following:

• An Amazon EC2 instance

• An S3 bucket

• An IAM user or role

• A DynamoDB table

• A network component such as an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), security group, or network access control list (ACL) table

For example, if Amazon S3 is a service in scope, Audit Manager can collect evidence about your S3 buckets. The exact evidence that's collected is determined by a control's data source. For instance, if the data source type is AWS Config, and the data source mapping is an AWS Config rule (such as s3-bucket-public-write-prohibited), Audit Manager collects the result of that rule evaluation as evidence.

Note

Keep in mind that a service in scope is different to a data source type, which can also be an AWS service or something else. For more information, see What's the difference between a service in scope and a data source type? in the Troubleshooting section of this guide.

Standard control

See control.