Amazon Web Services Inc. announced today that it has joined the company Sheltered Harbor Alliance Programa nonprofit industry consortium dedicated to increasing cyber resilience in financial services.

As part of joining the alliance, AWS aims to simplify the process of building cyber vault capabilities for AWS. The collaboration aims to strengthen protection against ransomware attacks, improve operational resilience and help address regulatory mandates for financial institutions using AWS infrastructure.

Founded in 2017, the Sheltered Harbor Alliance is a nonprofit industry initiative dedicated to strengthening the cyber resilience of the financial sector. The alliance sets standards for data protection that enable institutions to quickly recover from cyber attacks or catastrophic data failures, even when critical systems are compromised.

The alliance works with financial firms and technology providers to establish secure and 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 growing cyber threats.

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

Through collaboration, financial services organizations can now access prescriptive guidance from AWS and implement cloud-native Sheltered Harbor data storage, simplifying the process of safeguarding their critical data in the cloud and meeting regulatory data protection requirements. In the event of a cyber attack or other disruptive incident, organizations can quickly restore operations from their trusted secure data vault, minimizing downtime and financial losses.

“As the frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks continue to increase, financial institutions must have robust data protection and recovery strategies in place,” said Scott Mullins, general manager of Worldwide Financial Services at AWS. “The Sheltered Harbor partnership demonstrates AWS’ commitment to continuously innovate to meet the unique security and resiliency requirements of the financial services industry.”

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