AWS and Sheltered Harbor Partner to Help Financial Firms Protect Against Ransomware

[November 14, 2024] - Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced it has joined the Sheltered Harbor AllianceProgram. Sheltered Harbor, a non-profit industry consortium that is dedicated to enhancing cyber resiliency of financial services, and AWS are partnering to simplify the process of building cyber vault capabilities for AWS Customers. This collaboration aims to bolster protection against ransomware attacks, improve operational resiliency, and help address regulatory mandates for financial institutions utilizing AWS infrastructure.

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. Sheltered Harbor's resilience standards and specifications, combined with the breadth and depth of AWS security technologies, provide financial services organizations with additional ways to safeguard their most critical data and systems against ransomware attacks and other disruptive events.

Financial services organizations now can access the prescriptive guidance from AWS and implement cloud native Sheltered Harbor data vaulting quickly and efficiently. This simplifies the process for financial institutions to safeguard their critical data in the cloud and meet regulatory requirements for data protection. 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 escalate, 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's commitment to continuously innovating to meet the unique security and resilience requirements of the financial services industry."

"Experiencing ransomware and the likely impact of such an attack is no longer just possible, it is happening at an increasing rate globally. Having an effective recovery plan will help organizations survive such devastation. That includes protection of critical data by securely isolating an immutable and recoverable copy in a zero-trust, Sheltered Harbor certifiable data vault. With AWS as an Alliance Partner, we know that the Sheltered Harbor approach can be implemented more quickly and easily by organizations of all sizes," said Carlos Recalde, President and CEO of Sheltered Harbor.

For financial institutions seeking to enhance their cyber resilience, the combination of AWS and Sheltered Harbor offers a proven architecture to safeguard critical financial assets. To learn more, please visit https://shelteredharbor.org/aws-sheltered-harbor-vaulting-architecture.

About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers-including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies-trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth's Best Employer, and Earth's Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/aboutand follow @AmazonNews.

About Sheltered Harbor
Sheltered Harbor is a not-for-profit industry-led "standard setting and certification" organization, founded to enhance the resilience and stability of the financial sector. Sheltered Harbor standards help institutions plan for and recover from a catastrophic operational outage or loss of data, even when the institution's critical systems - including backups - fail. The Sheltered Harbor specifications were created in partnership with subject matter experts across the sector and are recognized by regulators globally to help financial firms survive a crisis. Sheltered Harbor is an independent subsidiary of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center ("FS-ISAC"). For more information, visit shelteredharbor.org.