COMPAS: AWS incident response supporting secure automotive plant operations

COMPAS (Cooperation Manufacturing Plant Aguascalientes) is an automotive assembly plant in Aguascalientes, Mexico, created as a joint venture by Mercedes-Benz Group and Nissan (Renault-Nissan-Daimler) to manufacture premium compact vehicles, producing over 230,000 vehicles annually under advanced manufacturing, quality, and operational standards aligned with global automotive requirements.

Organizations operating on AWS require a security incident response capability that is consistent, auditable, and aligned with AWS best practices. Key challenges included: lack of standardized processes for resilience and incident recovery, manual and error-prone infrastructure changes, limited operational visibility based on metrics and logs, inconsistent security controls across networking, encryption, and identities, and account and access governance that increased operational risk.

AWS Security Incident Response provides an operating model to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from security incidents on AWS, combining technical controls, operational processes, and cost analysis.

The solution is built on: infrastructure automation through CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code, secure, resilient, and highly available architectures, continuous workload health monitoring using metrics and logs, operational runbooks and incident response playbooks, centralized governance of accounts, identities, and access, and cost analysis based on right sizing and right pricing.

The architecture includes: workload health metrics in Amazon CloudWatch, centralized application and VPC network logs, automated CloudWatch Alarms, federated access with temporary IAM credentials, mandatory MFA, Multi-AZ architecture, serverless application layer with AWS Lambda, and CI/CD pipelines with versioned CloudFormation templates.