Yes, Vanta integrates natively with AWS to provide continuous compliance monitoring and automated security assessments across your cloud environment.
Overview
Vanta is a compliance automation platform that helps organizations maintain security certifications and meet regulatory requirements. AWS is the world’s leading cloud infrastructure provider. When connected, Vanta gains deep visibility into your AWS environment, continuously monitoring configurations, access controls, and security posture to support compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA.
This integration eliminates the manual work of collecting evidence for audits and security assessments. Instead of spreadsheets and manual reviews, Vanta automatically discovers resources in your AWS account, tests security controls, and generates compliance reports.
How the Integration Works
- Read-Only Access via IAM Role: You grant Vanta a read-only AWS IAM role that allows it to inspect your account’s resources, configurations, and settings without making changes or accessing sensitive data.
- Continuous Resource Discovery: Vanta automatically discovers EC2 instances, S3 buckets, RDS databases, IAM policies, CloudTrail logs, and other AWS resources relevant to security and compliance.
- Automated Control Testing: The platform runs pre-built security controls against your AWS environment to verify encryption, access restrictions, logging, and other compliance requirements are in place.
- Real-Time Compliance Dashboard: A centralized dashboard shows your compliance status across multiple frameworks, highlighting gaps and remediation steps needed.
- Evidence Collection: Vanta automatically collects and organizes evidence (screenshots, logs, configurations) needed for audits, reducing the time your team spends gathering documentation.
Key Features & Capabilities
- Automated Compliance Reporting: Generate SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and other compliance reports directly from AWS data without manual compilation.
- Security Control Validation: Vanta continuously tests whether your AWS resources meet security best practices—encryption enabled, public access blocked, logging configured, and more.
- Multi-Account Support: Monitor compliance across multiple AWS accounts and organizations from a single Vanta dashboard.
- Audit-Ready Documentation: Automatically generate audit-ready evidence packages with screenshots, configuration details, and timestamps for regulatory reviews.
- Risk Prioritization: Identify high-risk compliance gaps and get actionable remediation steps to fix them quickly.
- Change Tracking: Monitor when AWS configurations change and how those changes affect your compliance posture.
Setup Difficulty
Easy (5–10 minutes)
Setting up the Vanta–AWS integration requires minimal technical effort. You create a read-only IAM role in your AWS account using a CloudFormation template or manual steps provided by Vanta, then authorize Vanta to assume that role. No code or complex configuration is needed. Most organizations complete setup in under 10 minutes.
What Gets Synced
Vanta syncs read-only data from your AWS environment, including:
- EC2 instance configurations and security groups
- S3 bucket policies and encryption settings
- IAM users, roles, and permission policies
- RDS database encryption and backup configurations
- CloudTrail logs and API activity
- VPC and network configurations
- KMS key policies and encryption key usage
Vanta does not modify, delete, or write to your AWS resources. The integration is read-only and non-invasive.
Alternatives
If the native Vanta–AWS integration doesn’t fully meet your needs, consider these alternatives:
- AWS Security Hub + Third-Party Tools: Use AWS Security Hub for native security monitoring, then integrate with tools like Splunk, Datadog, or Lacework for deeper compliance automation.
- Manual Compliance Tools: Platforms like Drata, Secureframe, or Workiva also integrate with AWS and may offer different compliance frameworks or reporting features.
- Custom Scripts + AWS APIs: For highly specialized needs, build custom Python or Terraform scripts that pull AWS data via the AWS SDK and feed it into your compliance system.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Vanta have access to sensitive data in my AWS account?
No. Vanta uses a read-only IAM role that allows it to inspect configurations and settings only. It cannot access the actual contents of S3 buckets, database records, or other sensitive data. The role is scoped to view metadata and configuration details needed for compliance assessment.
Can I use Vanta with multiple AWS accounts?
Yes. Vanta supports multi-account AWS environments. You can authorize Vanta to monitor compliance across multiple AWS accounts and view them all in a single dashboard. This is useful for organizations with separate AWS accounts for development, staging, and production.
How often does Vanta scan my AWS environment?
Vanta continuously monitors your AWS environment. Scans run frequently throughout the day to detect configuration changes and compliance drift in near real-time. You can also trigger manual scans on demand from the dashboard.
What compliance frameworks does Vanta support for AWS?
Vanta supports multiple frameworks including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and others. The integration automatically maps AWS configurations to control requirements for each framework, so you can see your compliance status across multiple standards simultaneously.
Disclaimer
Integration features and capabilities may change as both Vanta and AWS release updates. This guide reflects current integration capabilities as of the publication date. Always verify current features and setup requirements on Vanta’s official integration documentation and AWS partner pages before implementing.