As organizations adopt cloud platforms like AWS to scale their operations, they are faced with the task of understanding where their data resides and ensuring its security, privacy, and compliance across diverse services and regions. The sheer volume and variety of cloud-based data sources—from storage and databases to analytics and machine learning services—can create a fragmented data landscape that is difficult to track and secure. As businesses move toward multi-cloud and multi-account environments, identifying, mapping, and managing these data sources becomes even more complex.

Alongside these challenges, organizations must navigate a wide range of security concerns, from the increased attack surface created by expanding cloud services, to ensuring compliance with strict regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. The rise of identity and access management (IAM) systems has added further complexity, requiring careful configuration of fine-grained access controls to ensure that only authorized users or systems can access sensitive data. Additionally, managing credentials securely, optimizing cloud performance while controlling costs, and integrating data management practices between on-premises systems and the cloud—particularly in hybrid environments—present ongoing hurdles for organizations.

Expanding AWS Capabilities

BigID continues to build on its AWS integration strategy with two key advancements that enhance data security and operational efficiency across the AWS ecosystem:

Expanded Discovery with New Native Connectors

BigID introduces native connectors for Amazon RDS, EBS, Neptune, and WorkDocs, significantly broadening its data discovery capabilities across AWS services.

  • The RDS connector offers dual-scanning functionality for more flexible and comprehensive insights.
  • The EBS connector leverages side-scanning via Direct APIs, enabling efficient scans while ensuring data remains securely within customer environments.
  • These new scanning capabilities boost both performance and operational efficiency, allowing organizations to manage their AWS data assets more effectively.

AWS Graviton Ready Designation

BigID has achieved the AWS Graviton Ready designation, further optimizing its platform for organizations leveraging AWS Graviton processors. This milestone allows customers to benefit from improved scanning performance and reduced costs, maximizing the efficiency of their cloud operations.

Together, these advancements empower organizations to tackle their most pressing cloud data management challenges. Next, we’ll explore how these integrated capabilities with native AWS services help customers mitigate risks, strengthen cloud data governance, and ensure compliance in today’s dynamic cloud landscape.

Autodiscovery: Automatic Data Source Detection

BigID’s Autodiscovery feature offers an efficient, automated approach to identifying data sources across various AWS services. Autodiscovery detects data sources in numerous AWS services, including S3, DynamoDB, RDS, Redshift, Athena, Kinesis, DocumentDB, EFS, EBS, Neptune, and OpenSearch. Autodiscovery constantly builds an accurate, up-to-date inventory of your data storage locations, making initiating targeted discovery and classification processes easier.

This Autodiscovery capability supports single-account and multi-account AWS deployments through integration with AWS Organizations. It allows enterprises with complex multi-account structures to centralize data discovery, establishing a unified view of data across their AWS environment.

The Autodiscovery process detects data sources and intelligently maps each identified data source to the appropriate scanner location based on your business requirements. This mapping improves data access and optimizes scanning efficiency by ensuring the system scans data sources precisely where needed. BigID provides a range of flexible deployment options for scanning data, tailored to meet diverse organizational needs and data locality requirements.

In the following section, we’ll explore the various deployment options available for BigID scanners, designed to seamlessly integrate with your AWS organization architecture.

BigID Scanning Architecture: Flexible, Optimized for Performance and Cost

Once Autodiscovery identifies and maps your data sources, BigID provides several scanning architecture options to match your organization’s requirements. Discovered data sources can be allocated to different scanning architecture models, allowing you to choose the best fit for your organization’s constraints.

  • Scanning from SaaS: BigID SaaS scanners can directly handle scanning, which is ideal for lowering your total cost of scanning and for faster time to value.
  • Centralized Scanning: Organizations can scan from one AWS account for multi-account structures that prefer central data processing. The scanner will perform IAM role chaining to access data in other AWS accounts.
  • Account-Local Scanning: Each AWS account can have its own scanner for localized data processing, ensuring complete IAM isolation between accounts.
  • Regional Scanning: For globally distributed AWS environments, regional scanning reduces data transfer costs to a minimum. It is compatible with both centralized and account local scanning.

You can implement multiple scanning architectures simultaneously for various data sources or different parts of your AWS organizations.

In the following section, we’ll cover how BigID’s cloud operational excellence ensures that your scanning activities are secure and cost-effective.

Cloud Operational Excellence

BigID drives Cloud Operational Excellence on AWS and has earned recognition as AWS PrivateLink Ready and AWS Graviton Ready through certifications from the AWS Partner Network. With PrivateLink, BigID’s local scanners deployed in private subnets can connect securely to BigID SaaS via a VPC endpoint, keeping all data traffic within the AWS network and protected from exposure to the public internet. It enhances security as the scanner won’t need internet connectivity to reach BigID SaaS. Additionally, the BigID scanner supports deployment over a Graviton-based CPU, which offers efficient, cost-effective processing for data-intensive workloads.

Secure Authentication with IAM and Secrets Manager

To streamline and secure data access, BigID supports IAM roles and, IAM role chaining, and integrates with AWS Secrets Manager to manage database credentials. IAM roles enable secure, fine-grained access control without the need to hardcode credentials for almost any cloud-native data source. Our integration with Secrets Manager provides secure, just-in-time access to secrets for data sources that are not IAM-authenticated. With these options, we aim to make your BigID journey credentials-free, eliminating the need for you to provide environment credentials.

AWS Cloud Native Scanner

BigID’s AWS Cloud-native scanner is designed for easy deployment on Amazon ECS Fargate, making it a flexible and fully managed solution for data scanning needs. The scanner simplifies scaling by automatically scaling to zero when there are no scanning tasks, which minimizes infrastructure costs by only consuming resources when active. This cloud-native approach ensures seamless integration with AWS services, allowing organizations to deploy, scale, and manage their scanning activities with minimal setup and oversight. The on-demand scaling capability, coupled with the serverless nature of ECS Fargate, makes the BigID scanner an efficient, cost-effective solution for dynamic data environments.

With your scanner deployed and data sources connected, you can start assessment scans to quickly find issues reported as DSPM cases in the Security Posture dashboard.

SecurityHub Integration

The BigID AWS Security Hub integration enhances cloud security by synchronizing BigID’s Security Posture cases with AWS Security Hub, allowing real-time visibility into security issues across AWS accounts. This setup enables security and compliance teams to manage case status updates directly through AWS, offering streamlined workflows for identifying and remediating vulnerabilities.

Elevate Your AWS Data Governance with BigID

As cloud environments grow more complex, comprehensive data governance is crucial for securing sensitive information and maintaining compliance. BigID delivers the solutions to transform data management across your AWS landscape.

  • Extensive data coverage across AWS services for accurate discovery and classification
  • Streamlined security operations through integrations with IAM, Secrets Manager, and SecurityHub
  • Reduced compliance risks in dynamic, multi-account cloud environments

Take the next step in elevating your AWS data governance. Connect with BigID today to see how our solutions can help you secure, govern, and comply across your cloud environment.