AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Simplifying Cloud Governance and Regulatory Compliance with ServiceNow and AWS
By Sunil Bemarkar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Gian Mario Deluigi, Senior Outbound Product Manager – ServiceNow
 |
 |
Organizations in highly regulated markets face mounting pressure from regulatory bodies as they scale their cloud adoption. While managing compliance in traditional on-premises environments presented its own challenges, the dynamic nature of cloud adoption introduces new complexities.
Regulatory Compliance includes industry-specific requirements (PCI, HIPAA, DORA), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and many more. The common themes between of these regulations can be synthesized in the following use cases:
- Cloud Inventory: How many accounts and resources do you have across your AWS environments?
- Cloud Ownership: Who owns which accounts? Are these accounts still active or necessary?
- Service/Business context: How are they related to your business applications?
- Cost Controls: What’s the financial impact of orphaned or underused accounts?
AWS, as a leading cloud service provider, provides over 200 fully-featured services for organizations, including compute instances, storage, databases, and networking. The dynamic and scalable nature of AWS services means that the cloud environment is constantly evolving. Manually tracking these services is inefficient and prone to errors. Automating the discovery process is essential to provide IT teams with accurate, real-time insights into their AWS environment and crucial for achieving operational excellence.
ServiceNow is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that gives enterprises complete visibility of their entire IT environment, including virtualized and cloud infrastructure. ServiceNow gives enterprises complete visibility of their entire IT environment, including virtualized and cloud infrastructure. ServiceNow also simplifies service mapping, delivery, and assurance, consolidating IT service and infrastructure data into a single system of record.
Depicted in Figure 1 is Cloud Account Management (CAM), a new capability within the ServiceNow Cloud Workspace. It’s designed to help organizations establish strong foundational cloud compliance with automated governance workflows, aligned with AWS best practices.
Figure 1 – Landscape of Cloud Compliance
This blog post examines how ServiceNow’s Cloud Account Management enhances visibility into customer AWS environments. Addressing common cloud management issues and enabling IT Operations teams to create more controlled, cost-effective, and compliant cloud environments.
The Business Challenge: Growing Cloud Complexity, Reduced Visibility
The flexibility of AWS allows you to create many accounts for development, testing, production, and departmental use. However, manual or semi-automated management of these accounts may lead to unmanaged resources, budget overruns, and inconsistent security policies.
In many organizations, the ownership of cloud assets becomes unclear, particularly when employees depart or transition to new roles. This lack of clear ownership often results in unmanaged cloud assets, which can pose compliance risks. Inactive or forgotten workloads lead to budget overruns, as they continue to consume resources without contributing value. Adding to these challenges, Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) are often incomplete, providing IT departments with only partial visibility into the existing cloud infrastructure.
These issues extend far beyond the IT department, creating a ripple effect that generates substantial risks for Finance, Security, and Service Delivery teams throughout the organization.
The Solution: Cloud Account Management in ServiceNow Cloud Workspace
AWS offers robust native tools for managing cloud environments, such as AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). However, as organizations’ cloud environments expand, they seek additional capabilities. These include a centralized interface for handling account requests and managing account lifecycles. Many also desire a single, comprehensive system of record for cloud accounts and their respective ownership. Also, a need for an automated process that ensure cloud environments align with internal policies and comply with external regulations.
This is where ServiceNow CAM complements AWS, by operationalizing your cloud governance through a consistent, automated, and auditable model. CAM is the first feature within Cloud Workspace, a new ServiceNow application designed to unify cloud governance. CAM helps organizations:
- Standardize how AWS accounts are requested, approved, and provisioned
- Maintain up-to-date ownership and accountability
- Integrate cloud accounts into the ServiceNow CMDB, aligning with AWS multi-account best practices
- Enable cost controls and automated compliance through proactive account lifecycle governance
Key Features of CAM:
- Account Creation: Streamlined process to create cloud accounts with automated workflows for quick and consistent setup.
- Account Suspension/Locking: Ability to temporarily suspend or lock accounts based on compliance or security requirements.
- Account Reactivation/Unlocking: Easily reactivate suspended accounts when necessary, ensuring smooth operations with minimal downtime.
- Account Certification: Regular certification and auditing of accounts to ensure compliance with security and governance standards.
- Visualization: Comprehensive visualization tools to track account usage, structure, and compliance status.
- Policy-Based Rule Execution: Automated execution of rules and policies to enforce governance and security protocols across cloud environments, ensuring adherence to organizational guidelines.
CAM serves as a comprehensive, multi-cloud capability that offers a centralized platform for creating, managing, and decommissioning cloud accounts while ensuring compliance with governance policies. By implementing a structured approach, it helps organizations maintain control over their cloud environments, optimize costs, and achieve efficient IT spending.
Use Case Highlights: Governance That Scales
CAM helps IT leaders, Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoEs), and Asset/Service Management teams drive value in four key areas.
Inventory & Visibility. CAM ensures all AWS accounts are automatically discovered and registered into the ServiceNow CMDB. This gives IT and governance teams a real-time, centralized inventory of cloud accounts, including metadata like environment type, cost center, and business owner.
Ownership & Accountability. Each cloud account is mapped to a designated owner and certifier, enabling ongoing attestation and recertification. This is critical for compliance, especially as personnel change or roles evolve. No more “orphaned” accounts in your environment.
Service Awareness & CMDB Integration. By integrating with ServiceNow Discovery and Service Graph connectors for AWS, CAM feeds account and resource data directly into the CMDB. This allows teams to associate cloud accounts with business services, applications, or incidents — driving better service awareness and impact analysis.
Cost Controls & Budget Governance. Through integration with AWS Budgets and tagging, CAM enables teams to set budget alerts, freeze accounts when thresholds are exceeded, and control sprawl — particularly in dev/test environments. It provides financial guardrails without compromising agility.
From Manual to Managed: Lifecycle Automation with CAM
CAM supports the full lifecycle of an AWS account, from creation to decommissioning:
- Request: A team lead initiates a cloud account request through a self-service catalog
- Approve: Finance or cloud governance teams validate and approve the request
- Provision: CAM provisions the account using AWS APIs or Terraform, applying standard policies
- Visualize: The account and associated resources are discovered and added to the CMDB
- Monitor: Usage, compliance, and ownership are continuously monitored and managed
- Retire: When an account is no longer needed, it’s properly decommissioned with all approvals tracked
This structured lifecycle ensures that no account enters or exits your AWS landscape without visibility, control, and compliance.
Cloud Account Management is just the beginning. Built on the extensible Cloud Workspace, CAM is the foundation for a broader suite of capabilities, including cloud security management, cloud cost management, and cloud architecture management. All of these leverage a common data model and integrate seamlessly into the broader ServiceNow platform, enabling IT Operations, Security, and Finance to operate as one team.
Conclusion: Getting Ahead of Cloud Sprawl
As cloud complexity grows, managing accounts manually is no longer sustainable. Integrating AWS features with ServiceNow’s workflow and CMDB offers organizations a scalable way to manage cloud accounts, monitor spending and security, and align cloud operations with enterprise service management.
ServiceNow CAM isn’t about replacing AWS tools, it’s about enhancing them with enterprise-grade automation, accountability, and integration.If you’re navigating cloud sprawl, compliance audits, or cost overruns,ServiceNow CAM + AWS is your new foundation for a more governed, cost-efficient, and future-ready cloud.
ServiceNow Cloud Transformation on AWS is available as a SaaS offering in the AWS Marketplace. Check out the ServiceNow website to learn more and set up a demo.
.
.
ServiceNow – AWS Partner Spotlight
ServiceNow is an AWS Partner that gives enterprises complete visibility of their entire IT environment, including virtualized and cloud infrastructure. ServiceNow also simplifies service mapping, delivery, and assurance, consolidating IT service and infrastructure data into a single system of record.