AWS Security Hub: Compliance Monitoring and Finding Aggregation

Part of the Cybersecurity Skills Guide — This article is one deep-dive in our complete guide series.

By HADESS Team | February 28, 2026 | Updated: February 28, 2026 | 5 min read

Security Hub aggregates security findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, Firewall Manager, IAM Access Analyzer, and third-party tools into a single view. It also runs automated compliance checks against frameworks like CIS Benchmarks, PCI DSS, and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. Think of it as your security posture dashboard for AWS.

Compliance Standards

Security Hub supports multiple compliance standards out of the box. Enable at minimum:

• AWS Foundational Security Best Practices — AWS-curated checks covering IAM, S3, EC2, RDS, and more. This is the most comprehensive and regularly updated standard.
• CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark — Industry-standard checks aligned to CIS controls. Required by many compliance programs.
• PCI DSS — If you process payment card data, enable this and use it as an automated evidence source for your assessments.

Each standard consists of individual controls that generate findings of PASSED, FAILED, WARNING, or NOT_AVAILABLE. Focus on failed controls with CRITICAL and HIGH severity first. Track your security score per standard over time to show improvement.

Finding Aggregation

Security Hub normalizes findings from all integrated services into the AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF). This means a GuardDuty finding and an Inspector finding share the same schema, making it possible to build consistent workflows regardless of the source.

Set up a delegated administrator account in your organization to aggregate findings from all member accounts. Enable the cross-region aggregation feature to funnel findings from all regions into a single region for centralized management.

Custom Actions and Automation

Custom actions let you send selected findings to EventBridge for processing. Create custom actions for common response workflows:

• Remediate — Trigger a Lambda function that applies the fix (enable encryption, restrict a security group, enable logging)
• Suppress — Mark a finding as suppressed with a justification when it is an accepted risk
• Escalate — Send the finding to PagerDuty or your incident management system

Build automated remediation for controls that have safe, predictable fixes. For example, automatically enabling S3 encryption or blocking public access when a failed control is detected. For controls where automated remediation could cause outages (like modifying security groups), send a notification instead and let an engineer review.

Insights and Custom Findings

Security Hub Insights are saved collections of related findings. Create insights for:

• All critical findings across a specific account
• Failed compliance checks grouped by resource type
• Findings trending upward over the past 30 days
• Resources with the most findings

You can also push custom findings into Security Hub using the BatchImportFindings API. Use this to integrate findings from tools Security Hub does not natively support — vulnerability scanners, code analysis tools, or internal security checks. Standardize on ASFF so everything shows up in one place.

Operationalizing Security Hub

The biggest mistake teams make is enabling Security Hub and then ignoring it. With hundreds of controls and findings from multiple sources, it becomes noise quickly.

Assign ownership for each compliance standard to a team. Create a process for reviewing new findings weekly. Track metrics: total open findings by severity, mean time to remediate, and compliance score trends. Report these metrics to leadership.

Next Steps

• Evaluate your compliance and monitoring skills with the assessment tool
• Explore cloud governance topics in the skills library
• Search for roles requiring Security Hub skills in the job search tool

Related Guides in This Series

• Active Directory Security: Attack Paths and Hardening — HADESS | 2026
• AWS ALB Security: TLS, Authentication, and Access Controls — HADESS | 2026
• AWS CloudTrail: Log Analysis and Security Monitoring — HADESS | 2026

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