Amazon Web Services Inc. announced today that it has joined the Sheltered Harbor Alliance program, a nonprofit industry consortium dedicated to enhancing cyber resiliency in financial services.

As part of joining the alliance, AWS is aiming to simplify the process of building cyber vault capabilities for AWS. The collaboration aims to bolster protection against ransomware attacks, improve operational resiliency and help address regulatory mandates for financial institutions utilizing 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 allow institutions to recover quickly from cyberattacks or catastrophic data failures, even when critical systems are compromised.

The Alliance collaborates with financial firms and technology providers to establish secure, isolated data vaults that safeguard sensitive information. By adhering to Sheltered Harbor’s standards, institutions can ensure operational continuity and compliance with regulatory mandates, reducing the risk of significant financial loss in the face of rising 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, provide financial services organizations with additional ways to safeguard their critical data and systems against ransomware attacks and other disruptive events.

Through the collaboration, financial services organizations can now access prescriptive guidance from AWS and implement cloud-native Sheltered Harbor data vaulting, simplifying the process to safeguard their critical data in the cloud and meet regulatory requirements for data protection. In the event of a cyberattack 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’ commitment to continuously innovating to meet the unique security and resilience requirements of the financial services industry.”

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