Customer Overview
Aspia Space is a UK-based startup specialising in geospatial analytics and earth observation technologies. The company transforms Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data into optical and infrared satellite imagery, enabling cloud-free, all-weather visualisation for strategic planning, crisis response, and environmental monitoring. Serving both public and private sector clients, Aspia Space is part of the UK’s fast-growing space and AI ecosystem. As a data-centric startup, Aspia’s commercial edge depends on the secure processing and protection of its proprietary image data.
Challenge
Aspia Space needed a secure, scalable cloud foundation to run its SAR-based data processing applications. Although not bound by specific regulatory standards, the business faced critical security challenges: safeguarding sensitive IP, protecting processing outputs, and ensuring operational resilience as the company scaled.
Aspia’s workloads were data-intensive and IP-rich, requiring a platform that could prevent unauthorised data transfers, track user activity, and enable full auditability from day one. The solution needed to embed application-layer security — not only securing storage and infrastructure, but also enforcing access policies and runtime monitoring for cloud-native processing pipelines. With limited internal resources, Aspia also needed a solution that was automated, cost-efficient, and aligned with AWS-native best practices for long-term maintainability.
Why Cloudscaler and AWS
Aspia partnered with Cloudscaler to deploy a production-ready AWS environment with strong security guardrails. The decision was driven by a need for identity-driven access control, continuous application-layer visibility, and a clear path to scalable security operations.
The solution required:
- Role-based access control tailored to engineering and data processing roles,
- Customer-managed encryption for all sensitive data at rest,
- Real-time detection and alerting of abnormal application activity,
- Automated compliance checks aligned to security frameworks like CIS and NIST,
- And minimal operational overhead for a lean technical team.
Cloudscaler’s Enhanced Landing Zone provided these capabilities out of the box, enabling rapid deployment and hands-off security posture management for Aspia’s high-growth startup environment.
Solution
Cloudscaler deployed a secure AWS Landing Zone confined to the London (eu-west-2) region using AWS Organizations and Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce data residency. Identity and access were tightly governed through AWS IAM Identity Center, integrated with Aspia’s internal users and scoped to short-lived sessions with multi-factor authentication.
IAM roles were provisioned via Terraform, ensuring repeatability and alignment with least-privilege principles. Each role was tailored to distinct application functions, including data ingestion, pipeline execution, and infrastructure administration. IAM Access Analyzer and credential reports were used to flag excessive permissions or unused roles, with access logs captured via AWS CloudTrail and visualised in Amazon CloudWatch dashboards.
To secure data at rest, Cloudscaler implemented AWS Key Management Service (KMS) with customer-managed keys. Bucket policies and firewall rules were designed to prevent unauthorised data transfers across accounts. All backups were managed via AWS Backup and retained within the UK region.
Application-layer protection was reinforced with AWS WAF to secure API endpoints, and Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub were used to continuously monitor identity behaviour and configuration drift. Alerts from GuardDuty were routed through Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda to enable near real-time remediation. Security Hub was configured with industry-standard benchmarks (CIS v3.0.0, NIST 800-53, AWS Foundational Best Practices), and compliance results were surfaced via custom dashboards.
Outcomes
Aspia Space now operates a secure, scalable AWS environment purpose-built for its satellite imagery processing applications. Key results include:
- All application access managed via federated IAM Identity Center, with short-lived credentials and role-specific permissions.
- ABAC-style role design enabled least-privilege access across growing teams, while maintaining low operational overhead.
- Full compliance with CIS and NIST security benchmarks, validated via Security Hub and embedded compliance reporting.
- Substantial reduction in externally shared resources following implementation of IAM Access Analyzer.
- Real-time visibility into user and service activity, improving audit readiness and reducing risk of misconfiguration.
- Major reduction in access provisioning time, driven by Terraform-based automation of IAM roles and guardrails.
Technical Implementation Highlights
To achieve a lightweight but powerful security posture, the following AWS-native services were deployed:
- IAM Identity Center – Central identity layer with federated access and job-based role scoping
- IAM and Access Analyzer – Scoped permissions and detection of risky access patterns
- AWS Organizations and SCPs – Regional enforcement and security boundary controls
- AWS Config and Security Hub – Continuous compliance tracking against CIS/NIST frameworks
- Amazon GuardDuty and CloudTrail – Application-layer anomaly detection and access logging
- Amazon CloudWatch – Visualisation of findings and operational dashboards
- AWS KMS and Secrets Manager – Data encryption and secret rotation
- AWS Backup and Bucket Policies – Data retention and access control enforcement
- AWS WAF and Shield Standard – Protection of application endpoints and surface area reduction
- EventBridge and Lambda – Automated remediation workflows for high-confidence alerts
All infrastructure was delivered through Terraform, with CloudFormation used for core Landing Zone templates.
Conclusion
Aspia Space’s rapid growth and data-centric mission demanded a security-first foundation that could scale without adding friction. Cloudscaler delivered a lightweight, fully automated AWS environment where application access, data control, and compliance were embedded from day one. By focusing on application security — from identity management to runtime monitoring — the solution empowers Aspia to innovate with confidence, protect its intellectual property, and maintain trust as it expands into new commercial and governmental partnerships.
