TheArtOfService
AWS Well-Architected Security PillarNIST SP 800-53 Rev 5

AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar covers 14% of NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5

42 of the 300 controls in NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 are already satisfied by evidence you collected for AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar. 258 are genuine gaps. Every claim below was judged against both control sets and then argued against; the ones that did not survive are published further down with the reason each failed.

14%
of the target already covered
42
controls evidenced
258
genuine gaps
0
claims rejected in review

This number is directional. It says how much of NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 your AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar evidence satisfies. The reverse pair is a different number, often very different, because a security standard has enormous depth for access control and almost none for lawful basis or data subject rights.

161 candidate mappings were examined and 0 were removed. Signed off 2026-08-19, review level machine verified. Mappings were judged by Claude Code rather than read line by line by a practitioner. Every claim shows its reasoning so you can check it. Ask and a practitioner will review this pair. This pair was signed off, then RETRACTED by its own builder on discovering that half of NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 carried label-only descriptions, and restored 2026-08-19 after that framework was rebuilt from the OSCAL catalogue. The mappings are unchanged and were never re-judged, because the judgement was sound; only the target text was thin.

Where the gaps are

Coverage is never evenly spread. A source standard usually satisfies one part of a target almost completely and barely touches another, and which part is which is the thing worth knowing before you plan the work.

IR - Incident Response4 of 9 evidenced, 5 to do
CM - Configuration Management5 of 14 evidenced, 9 to do
RA - Risk Assessment3 of 9 evidenced, 6 to do
IA - Identification and Authentication4 of 13 evidenced, 9 to do
AC - Access Control7 of 23 evidenced, 16 to do
AU - Audit and Accountability4 of 15 evidenced, 11 to do
SI - System and Information Integrity5 of 22 evidenced, 17 to do
SC - System and Communications Protection8 of 47 evidenced, 39 to do
CA - Assessment, Authorization, and Monitoring1 of 8 evidenced, 7 to do
SA - System and Services Acquisition1 of 17 evidenced, 16 to do
AT - Awareness and Training0 of 5 evidenced, 5 to do
CP - Contingency Planning0 of 12 evidenced, 12 to do
MA - Maintenance0 of 7 evidenced, 7 to do
MP - Media Protection0 of 8 evidenced, 8 to do
PE - Physical and Environmental Protection0 of 22 evidenced, 22 to do
PL - Planning0 of 8 evidenced, 8 to do
PM - Program Management0 of 32 evidenced, 32 to do
PS - Personnel Security0 of 9 evidenced, 9 to do
PT - PII Processing and Transparency0 of 8 evidenced, 8 to do
SR - Supply Chain Risk Management0 of 12 evidenced, 12 to do

Theme level, not control level, deliberately. The per-control list of what is evidenced and what is a gap is the report itself, so publishing it here would be publishing the thing being sold.

Claims that held

A sample. Each one names the control whose evidence does the work, the control it satisfies, and why.

SEC 3: How do you manage permissions for people and machines? | SEC03-BP06NIST800-AC-2argued against and upheld
Account management

Joiner mover leaver automation evidences account creation, modification and removal tied to authorised triggers.

SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP05NIST800-AC-2argued against and upheld
Account management

Credential reports and stale user removal evidence periodic account review and disabling of inactive accounts.

SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP04NIST800-AC-2argued against and upheld
Account management

Central IdP federation governs the account lifecycle, provisioning and deprovisioning an assessor samples.

SEC 3: How do you manage permissions for people and machines? | SEC03-BP08NIST800-AC-21argued against and upheld
Information Sharing. Enable authorized users to determine whether access authorizations assigned to a sharing partner match the information's access and use restrictions for [organization-defined] ; and Employ [organization-defined] to assist users in making information

Organisation scoped sharing conditions evidence that sharing partners match documented access restrictions.

SEC 3: How do you manage permissions for people and machines? | SEC03-BP07NIST800-AC-22argued against and upheld
Publicly accessible content

Public access detection with validation against documented intent is the review this control requires.

SEC 8: How do you protect your data at rest? | SEC08-BP04NIST800-AC-3argued against and upheld
Access enforcement

Layered IAM, resource, KMS and endpoint policies demonstrate enforcement of approved authorisations on data.

SEC 3: How do you manage permissions for people and machines? | SEC03-BP05NIST800-AC-3argued against and upheld
Access enforcement

Service control policies enforce non-negotiable authorisation boundaries that cannot be overridden locally.

SEC 3: How do you manage permissions for people and machines? | SEC03-BP02NIST800-AC-3argued against and upheld
Access enforcement

IAM policies granting only required actions, resources and conditions are the enforcement artefact assessors test.

Claims that did not hold

Nothing proposed for this pair was rejected in review. That is unusual and worth knowing rather than hiding: it means the candidate set was small and every candidate held.

The full report

Everything above is a sample. The report is every evidenced control and every gap, with the reasoning and the source document behind each one, in a form you can hand to an assessor. $299, emailed immediately.

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