How can you automate compliance monitoring of AWS resources?

Automating compliance monitoring of AWS resources is best achieved through AWS Config. AWS Config provides a service specifically designed to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. It continuously monitors and records resource configurations and helps you evaluate compliance with rules that you define.

By utilizing AWS Config, you can set up rules that reflect your compliance requirements, such as checking if encryption is enabled on Amazon S3 buckets or ensuring that EC2 instances are not publicly accessible. If a resource deviates from the defined compliance standards, AWS Config can trigger alerts or remediation procedures automatically, which significantly streamlines the compliance monitoring process.

This approach is particularly effective for maintaining visibility over your resource configurations, enabling organizations to ensure they adhere to internal policies and external regulations without the need for manual oversight.

In contrast, while AWS CloudTrail provides logging and monitoring of API calls, it does not specifically focus on compliance assessment regarding resource configuration. AWS Inspector is designed for vulnerability assessments specifically on EC2 instances and does not cover broad compliance scopes across multiple resource types, and Amazon Macie focuses on data privacy and security, particularly when it comes to sensitive data discovery in S3 buckets rather than overall compliance across AWS resources.