Stax Product Announcement at AWS re:Invent 2022

Stax is a Cloud Acceleration Platform built specifically to help resource-constrained technology teams deliver best-practice cloud foundations and solutions with significantly less risk, cost and time. Stax achieves this by providing a SaaS platform that enables you to deploy AWS Expert (Level 400) cloud foundations & solutions that align to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and other leading compliance frameworks that can be implemented by someone with AWS Foundational (Level 100) experience. Stax then continually manages and updates these solutions, preventing any drift from your defined architecture, security and compliance postures.

At AWS re:Invent 2022, we’re pleased to announce a whole swag of new capabilities that help you simplify the complexities of the cloud so that you can embrace the value of the cloud faster, cheaper, and with lower risk:

• Stax Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
• Stax Achieves SOC 2 Compliance Accreditation
• Proactively Manage & Reduce your public risk exposure in AWS with Stax Rules
• AWS Multi-Account Identity Management Simplified with Stax Identity Management
• Multi-Account AWS Service Configuration Simplified with Stax Foundations
• Leverage Stax Cost & Billing to stay on top of cost spikes and reduce AWS Wastage

Stax Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator 

We’ve helped companies of all shapes and sizes move to the cloud faster, cheaper and with lower risk. We’ve proved time and time again that Stax can help any of these companies deliver a Cloud Foundations solution 6x faster and at a significantly higher quality than if they had done it themselves. 

A common question we get from prospective customers is how this translates to cost savings over time, which can vary from company to company based on project size and cost of resources. With this in mind, we’ve synthesised Stax’s collective experience and insights from 1000s of Cloud Foundations projects to help create the Stax TCO Calculator. The Stax TCO Calculator helps you quickly compare the time and cost benefits of leveraging Stax vs Do-It-Yourself, specifically tuned to your company’s inputs.

Try it out for yourself at: http://www.stax.io/TCO-calculator 

Stax achieves SOC 2 Compliance Accreditation

We’re pleased to announce that we have completed our SOC2 Type 2 audit, adding to our existing PCI-DSS compliance accreditation. SOC2 Type 2  accreditation ensures that Stax, as a service provider, securely manages your data to protect your organisation's interests and clients' privacy. 

Following the SSAE 18 standard, specifically sections AT-C 105 and 205, governed by the AICPA, Stax was externally assessed and audited by an independent auditing firm to deliver Stax’s SOC 2 Type 2 report. 

Stax is the best way to implement & manage Well-Architected AWS Solutions

We’re pleased to announce increased capabilities that ensure Stax continues to be the best solution available to deploy and manage an AWS Multi-account & Well-Architected-Framework strategy.

Proactively Manage & Reduce your public risk exposure in AWS with Stax Rules

Stax Rules & Rule Bundles

Stax enables businesses to establish continuous monitoring for risk items, called Rules, which alert your team when a change impacts your risk posture. 

Stax makes adherence to industry standards, such as the CIS benchmark and AWS Well-Architected Framework, and internal compliance easy by providing Rule Bundles to reduce the burden of finding and creating your own sets of Rules. We’ve launched over 15 additional rules and introduced new rule bundles, such as our Public Exposure Rule Bundle, to ensure your AWS environment meets your compliance requirements all day, every day.

Stax Public Exposure Rule Bundle

Top of mind for many businesses now is reducing their risk from public exposure and losing customer data to bad actors. Stax’s Public Exposure rule bundle is one measure you can implement to mitigate this risk when running your services on AWS. We continually analyse your AWS environments and check these against the 28 most common public exposure vulnerabilities. 

AWS Multi-Account Identity Management Simplified with Stax Identity Management

SCIM Configuration in Stax

We’ve added support for System for Cross-Domain Integration Management (SCIM) which allows you to automatically update the users and groups in your Stax organisation when you make updates in your identity provider. Support for SCIM integration is now available for Azure AD, with other identity providers following soon based on customer demand.

Stax Permission Sets

When combined with Stax Permission-Sets, this enables flexible, fine-grained permissions control that can closely align with business functions. Users can sign in to AWS accounts via the Stax Console using roles assigned to them by their administrator. Permission Sets in Stax allow for the granting of tailored levels of access for users logging in to Stax-managed AWS accounts based on a policy document and a number of assignments. The policy document defines what someone utilising the Permission Set can do, and the assignment determines who can utilise the Permission Set and where.

stax2aws (Command Line Interface) CLI Tool

With stax2aws, you can further increase this AWS security posture while providing a first-class experience for your developers. stax2aws is a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool to gain temporary AWS credentials for Stax-managed AWS accounts. Using stax2aws, credentials can be obtained programmatically for your existing Stax identity in AWS accounts. stax2aws removes the requirement to generate long-lived IAM Users and associated secrets, significantly increasing your AWS security posture.

Multi-Account AWS Service Configuration Simplified with Stax Foundations

Stax Configurable Foundation Services

Stax has always been the most consistent and reliable way to ensure that you are running best-practice AWS service configurations in all your accounts and regions. At Stax, we call these Foundation Services. With the addition of Configurable Foundation Services, Stax now provides increased flexibility in how these Foundation Services are applied across your AWS estate, starting with Stax-Managed Security Hub.

At Stax, we see AWS Security Hub as an essential component of best-practice security in AWS. However, implementing Security Hub in all your accounts and regions may prove cost-prohibitive. Applying standards consistently across all your environments can also be complex and error-prone as it needs to be done per region, per account. For example, enabling a Security Hub configuration for five regions across 50 accounts extrapolates to 250 individual configurations you need to perform - Stax reduces this to one simple step. 

Stax Organisation Dashboard (Preview)

Our team is working on a new Stax Organization Dashboard, which gives you a clear view across all your AWS accounts in one spot—providing clarity on alignment to best-practice AWS configuration and highlighting security gaps that you need to remediate.

We’ve also introduced the capability to peer your existing AWS networks with your Stax-managed AWS networks from within the Stax console. This enables you to connect your existing AWS environments with Stax, to more easily leverage Stax to renovate your environments to best-practice standards at your own pace.

Leverage Stax Cost & Billing to stay on top of cost spikes and reduce AWS Wastage

Stax Cost & Billing

If you don’t feel in control of your cloud spending, you’re not alone. In our experience, most organisations are wasting 10-35% of their AWS spending without realising it. If that’s you, Stax’s Cost features can help get it under control. Stax enables you to receive an alert when you’ve overspent on your budget, along with advice for fixing the problem. Stax guides you to right-size your infrastructure, reserve EC2 upfront,  and remove infrastructure you’re not using, so you can spend your money where it matters.

Stax gives you total visibility across your organisation’s AWS accounts and resources, complete with snapshots into actual and predicted spending, along with data on tax, credits, savings plans, reserved instance (RI) purchases and support costs.

We’ve added new functionality so that you can now use Stax to visualise the AWS Savings Plans purchased by your organisation. The Savings Plans tab in the Cost module allows you to view a summary of all Savings Plans and visualise details about them. 

Savings Plan Visualisations in Stax

On the Data page, you can use the new Marketplace Product property to filter and group records by whether or not they are AWS Marketplace purchases. This is particularly useful when comparing AWS consumption in Stax to that which appears on your AWS invoice and when considering charge-back/show-back models internally. 

We’re super-excited about all these additional capabilities for Stax that we’re announcing at  AWS re:Invent 2022, helping you further simplify the cloud to accelerate your innovation! To find out more about Stax, sign up for a free trial, or talk to one of our experts, simply visit Stax.io