Stax uses IAM role assumption to access and manage accounts within Stax-managed AWS Organizations. To improve security and consistency, the existing roles used by Stax Assurance and its associated components will be replaced with new roles with fine-grained permissions.

There new roles will be prefixed with the IAM Path /stax/automation/ and have been added to the list of Stax Management Roles.

As a precaution both the existing and new roles will co-exist for a transition period, after which the existing roles will be removed from AWS Accounts. There is no expected interruption to service as a result of these changes.

This change will occur commencing 2025-08-05 and is expected to be completed by the end of the week on 2025-08-15.

Further configuration options have been added to the AWS Accounts configurable service page to allow you to fine-tune security protections for all Stax-managed AWS Accounts.

A new toggle to block SSM Document public sharing has been added.

This can be further enforced by appling the Guardrail Block changes to AWS Systems Manager public sharing settings.

For more information, refer to the documentation on Configure AWS Accounts.

The Activity Feed on the Stax Organization page has been enhanced to include additional context and information, including Tasks activity. The feed now also supports filtering and pagination, and is accessible via the API.

Visit Activity Feed in the docs to learn more.

You can now enable the NIST SP 800-171 Revision 2 standard in AWS Security Hub using Stax with the Stax-managed Security Hub using the Stax Console, API, and SDK.

For more information, see Using Stax-managed Security Hub in the docs.

Using the Stax Console, API, or SDK, you can now update the AWS Account name of Stax-managed AWS accounts. A new field will display the AWS Account name for a Stax-managed AWS account when viewing, onboarding or updating a Stax-managed account.

When a new Stax-managed AWS account is provisioned, Stax will name this AWS Account the same as the provided Stax name. When a new Stax-managed AWS account is onboarded through discovery the additional AWS Account name field allows you to rename the AWS Account at the same time as it becomes Stax-managed.

See Edit a Stax-Managed AWS Account for more information and to get started.

Stax-managed AWS Organizations can now disable regions via the Stax console, providing protections against access to regions that are not used by your Stax-managed AWS Organization.

As part of this feature, all Stax-managed AWS Organizations will also see the following changes to their Service Control Policies:

• stax-protection-unsupported-region/stax-protection-unsupported-resell will be removed from the AWS Organization root
• FullAWSAccess will be removed from the AWS Organization root
• StaxFullAWSAccess will be created and attached to the AWS Organization root. This policy is a combination of the two aforementioned policies, allowing more service control policies to be attached to the Organization root.

For more information, refer to the documentation on Using Stax-managed AWS Regions.

Stax announced in October 2024 that the Cost and Compliance modules would be shut down on 31 March 2025.

These components of Stax have now been shut down and are no longer accessible. Please see the announcement for more information.

You can now enable the AWS Resource Tagging Standard v1.0.0 and PCI DSS v4.0.1 standards in AWS Security Hub using Stax with the Stax-managed Security Hub using the Stax Console, API, and SDK.

For more information, see Using Stax-managed Security Hub in the docs.

Further configuration options have been added to the AWS Accounts configurable service page to allow you to fine-tune security protections for all Stax-managed AWS Accounts.

For more information, refer to the documentation on Configure AWS Accounts.

Following from our previous announcement, Stax-managed AWS Organizations can now use Configurable Guardrails to improve their security posture for all accounts across an organization using fine-tuned protections.

For more information, refer to the documentation on Configurable Guardrails.