Securing the Cloud for a Leading Southeast-Based Car Wash Chain

A prominent family-owned car wash chain operating over 80 locations across the Southeastern United States partnered with Aligned Technology Group to fortify its AWS cloud infrastructure. A thorough security assessment revealed critical vulnerabilities—ranging from misconfigured IAM policies to unencrypted storage. Aligned Technology Group executed a full-scale remediation project, introducing organization-wide controls, enhanced access policies, data encryption, centralized logging, and real-time monitoring. As a result, the car wash company now operates in a secure, compliant, and audit-ready AWS environment with improved visibility and threat detection.

This multi-location car wash company, founded in 1969 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the largest family-owned operations in the industry. With a reputation for environmental responsibility and outstanding service, the business continues to innovate its operations—leveraging technology to deliver fast, eco-friendly vehicle cleaning across more than 80 Southeast locations.

The car wash company managed several AWS accounts, including Production, Management, Audit, and Logging. A cloud security assessment by Aligned Technology Group identified key vulnerabilities: overly permissive IAM roles, missing logging alerts, unencrypted EBS volumes, and public exposure risks in S3 buckets. The customer required a structured plan to resolve these issues and bring their environment in line with AWS best practices and security benchmarks.

The company engaged Aligned Technology Group to perform a full AWS security remediation. Objectives included addressing issues across IAM, data encryption, monitoring, and alerting—while implementing scalable and compliant security configurations throughout the cloud environment.

Aligned Technology Group took a phased, methodical approach to remediation across the affected AWS environments:

1. IAM, SSO, and Access Analyzer Enhancements

• Enforced password policies (14+ characters, history enforcement).

• Deactivated unused credentials and enforced MFA.

• Restricted users to one active access key with rotation enforcement.

• Migrated access control to groups and roles.

• Activated IAM Access Analyzer in all AWS regions.

2. S3 Security Hardening

• Blocked HTTP access through bucket policies.

• Enabled MFA Delete and blocked public access.

• Verified classification and security of stored data.

3. Logging, Monitoring, and Encryption

• Encrypted all EBS volumes with pre-snapshot backups.

• Enabled AWS Config and CloudTrail in all regions, protected with KMS.

• Deployed VPC Flow Logs.

• Configured CloudWatch alarms for:

  • Unauthorized API activity

  • Root account usage

  • Login failures and key deletions

  • Security group, VPC, and organization changes

4. Security Hub and Network ACL Compliance

• Deployed AWS Security Hub for centralized security findings.

• Hardened network ACLs by restricting public administrative access

• Elastic Security Engineering: AWS-native, hands-on remediation
• Security Hardening: End-to-end IAM and encryption enforcement
• Compliance Readiness: Alignment with AWS and CIS frameworks
• Audit-Friendly Controls: Logging and alerting for critical actions
• Cost Awareness: Budget-conscious implementation of KMS and Security Hub

Aligned Technology Group successfully transformed the customer’s AWS security posture. With robust encryption, access control, and real-time alerting in place, the company is now well-positioned for compliance audits and proactive threat detection. Their cloud environment has matured into a secure and resilient infrastructure aligned with modern cloud security standards.