Ref: https://learn.cantrill.io/courses/1820301/lectures/41301379
Amazon Macie - Key Concepts
- đź”§Â Service for security and privacy of data stored in S3
- Discovers, monitors and protects data stored in S3 buckets
- Can perform automated discovery of sensitive data
- e.g. Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI), SSH keys, financial information…
- Data identifiers → identify and inventory sensitive data
- Can be thought of as rules which objects & contents are assessed against
- Two types
- Managed data identifiers
- Built-in, use ML/pattern-matching
- Can detect almost all common types of sensitive data
- Custom data identifiers
- Proprietary, regex-based
- Can e.g. find certain patterns in your business like employee IDs
- Discovery jobs use identifiers to find any matches in buckets → generate findings
- Findings can be viewed interactively
- Findings can integrate with AWS Services
- e.g. Security Hub, or sending “finding events” to EventBridge
- Multi-account architecture
- Administrator account can manage Macie within member accounts
- Central management either via AWS Organizations or explicit account inviting
Amazon Macie - Architecture

- Discovery job is scheduled
- Discovery job uses managed and custom data identifiers to scan S3 buckets and generate findings
- Findings can trigger events in EventBridge → can be used for event-driven remediation (e.g. Lambda function that masks PII in S3 buckets)