Overview

• Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to help you discover, monitor, and protect sensitive data in your AWS environment.
• Macie automates the discovery of sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data, to provide you with a better understanding of the data that your organization stores in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Macie also provides you with an inventory of your S3 buckets, and it automatically evaluates and monitors those buckets for security and access control.
• If Macie detects sensitive data or potential issues with the security or privacy of your data, it creates detailed findings for you to review and remediate as necessary.

Features of Amazon Macie

• Automate the discovery of sensitive data
  • With Macie, you can automate discovery and reporting of sensitive data by creating sensitive data discovery jobs​​​​​​​
  • A sensitive data discovery job analyzes objects in S3 buckets to determine whether they contain sensitive data.
• Discover a variety of sensitive data types
• Evaluate and monitor data for security and access control
• Review and analyze findings
• Monitor and process findings with other services and systems
  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​EventBridge
  • Security Hub
• Centrally manage multiple Macie accounts
  • ​​​​​​​integrating Macie with AWS Organizations
  • sending membership invitations from Macie
• Develop and manage resources programmatically

Discovering sensitive data

• To discover sensitive data with Amazon Macie, you create and run sensitive data discovery jobs.
• By creating and running sensitive data discovery jobs, you can automate discovery, logging, and reporting of sensitive data in your S3 buckets.
• Each sensitive data discovery job can analyze objects by using managed data identifiers that Macie provides, custom data identifiers that you define, or a combination of the two
• managed data identifiers can detect a large and growing list of sensitive data types for many countries and regions, including multiple types of financial data, personal health information (PHI), and personally identifiable information (PII)
• custom data identifiers can detect sensitive data that reflects your organization's particular scenarios, intellectual property, or proprietary data
• Macie can analyze an object if the following is true:
  • The object uses a supported file or storage format. 
  • If the object is encrypted, it’s encrypted with a key that Macie is allowed to use.
  • The object is stored directly in Amazon S3 and uses a supported storage class—S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 One Zone-IA, S3 Standard, or S3 Standard-IA.
    • Macie can’t analyze data that’s stored in Amazon S3 Glacier or other AWS services.
  • If the bucket has a restrictive bucket policy, the policy allows Macie to access objects in the bucket.
• You can run a job only once, for on-demand analysis and assessment, or on a recurring basis for periodic analysis, assessment, and monitoring. 
• Each sensitive data discovery job produces records of the sensitive data that it finds and the analysis that it performs—sensitive data findings and sensitive data discovery results.
  • A sensitive data finding is a detailed report of sensitive data that Macie found in an object.
  • A sensitive data discovery result is a record that logs details about the analysis of an object. 

Understanding Findings

• Amazon Macie generates two categories of findings: policy findings and sensitive data findings.
• A policy finding is a detailed report of a potential policy violation for an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
• A sensitive data finding is a detailed report of sensitive data in an S3 object

​​​​​​​Reference

What is Amazon Macie? - Amazon Macie