UK Cyber EssentialsAWS Well-Architected Security Pillar

UK Cyber Essentials covers 15.9% of AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar

10 of the 63 controls in AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar are already satisfied by evidence you collected for UK Cyber Essentials. 53 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.

15.9%

of the target already covered

controls evidenced

genuine gaps

claims rejected in review

This number is directional. It says how much of AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar your UK Cyber Essentials 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.

34 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.

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.

Infrastructure Protection4 of 9 evidenced, 5 to do

Identity & Access Management5 of 15 evidenced, 10 to do

Security Foundations1 of 8 evidenced, 7 to do

Incident Response0 of 8 evidenced, 8 to do

Application Security0 of 8 evidenced, 8 to do

Detection0 of 4 evidenced, 4 to do

Data Protection0 of 11 evidenced, 11 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.

CE-AC.7SEC 1: How do you securely operate your workload? | SEC01-BP02argued against and upheld

Secure account root user and properties

Both require multi-factor authentication on the highest privilege cloud account.

CE-SC.6SEC 1: How do you securely operate your workload? | SEC01-BP02argued against and upheld

Secure account root user and properties

Both require multi-factor authentication on administrative cloud service accounts.

CE-AC.8SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP01argued against and upheld

Use strong sign-in mechanisms

Both accept phishing resistant passwordless authenticators as the sign-in mechanism.

CE-AC.7SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP01argued against and upheld

Use strong sign-in mechanisms

Both require multi-factor authentication for human administrative sign-in.

CE-SC.6SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP01argued against and upheld

Use strong sign-in mechanisms

Both require multi-factor authentication for user accounts on cloud services.

CE-SC.5SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP01argued against and upheld

Use strong sign-in mechanisms

Both require enforced password length, quality and brute force protection.

CE-AC.6SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP05argued against and upheld

Audit and rotate credentials periodically

Both require periodic review of privileged credentials with removal of unused access.

CE-AC.4SEC 2: How do you manage identities for people and machines? | SEC02-BP05argued against and upheld

Audit and rotate credentials periodically

Both require an accurate tracked record of privileged accounts to audit against.

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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