Implementing AWS Config Rules for Compliance

When to Use

• When establishing continuous compliance monitoring for AWS resources against regulatory standards
• When implementing automated detection and remediation of configuration drift
• When building a compliance dashboard across multiple AWS accounts using AWS Organizations
• When audit teams require evidence of continuous compliance rather than point-in-time assessments
• When deploying guardrails that detect non-compliant resources within minutes of creation

Do not use for real-time threat detection (use GuardDuty), for application vulnerability scanning (use Inspector), or for one-time compliance assessments (use Prowler for faster ad-hoc audits).

Prerequisites

• AWS Config recording enabled in all target accounts and regions
• IAM role with config:*, ssm:*, and lambda:* permissions for rule management
• AWS Organizations with delegated administrator for Config aggregation
• S3 bucket for Config delivery channel and SNS topic for notifications
• CloudFormation StackSets or Terraform for multi-account rule deployment