Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced that it has joined the Sheltered Ports Alliance Programa non-profit industry consortium dedicated to improving cyber resilience in financial services.

As part of its membership in the alliance, AWS aims to simplify the process of creating cyber vault capabilities for AWS. The collaboration aims to strengthen protection against ransomware attacks, improve operational resilience, and meet regulatory mandates for financial institutions using AWS infrastructure.

Founded in 2017, the Sheltered Harbor Alliance is a not-for-profit industry initiative dedicated to strengthening the cyber resilience of the financial sector. The alliance establishes data protection standards that enable institutions to quickly recover from cyberattacks or catastrophic data outages, even when critical systems are compromised.

The Alliance works with financial companies and technology providers to establish secure, isolated data vaults that protect sensitive information. By adhering to Sheltered Harbor standards, institutions can ensure operational continuity and compliance with regulatory mandates, reducing the risk of significant financial losses in the face of increasing cyber threats.

Sheltered Harbor and AWS have collaborated to define an architecture that meets a robust set of safeguards and controls prescribed in an AWS environment as defined by Sheltered Harbor. The alliance’s resiliency standards and specifications, combined with AWS security technologies, provide financial services organizations with additional ways to protect their critical data and systems from ransomware attacks and other disruptive events.

Through this collaboration, financial services organizations can now access prescriptive guidance from AWS and implement cloud-native Sheltered Harbor data storage, simplifying the process of backing up their critical data to the cloud and addressing the data protection regulatory requirements. In the event of a cyberattack or other disruptive incident, organizations can quickly restore operations from their secure and reliable data vault, minimizing downtime and financial losses.

“As the frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks continue to grow, financial institutions must implement robust data protection and recovery strategies,” said Scott Mullins, general manager of Global Financial Services at AWS. “The Sheltered Harbor partnership demonstrates AWS’s commitment to continually innovate to meet the unique security and resiliency demands of the financial services industry.

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