The cybersecurity market is expanding rapidly — to the tune of $1 trillion in global spending expected over the next five years. That means a lot of new market entrants. While venture capital is pouring into cyber startups, major tech brands are also marching onto the field.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the newest big name in cybersecurity with the debut of its GuardDuty service. While AWS already provides a secure platform and related services to its customers, the new productized offering steps on a lot of toes in a market rife with point players offering similar solutions.
The real attention grabber in the AWS press release announcing Amazon GuardDuty is the rapid user adoption from large enterprise customers, including GE, Netflix, FINRA and Autodesk.
The takeaway is clear: AWS is pulling up a seat to the CISO’s desk at Fortune 500 and Global 2000 corporations and scores of large enterprises. Given the size and scale of the AWS cloud platform — and the universe of customers placing their IT infrastructures on it — AWS can potentially run the table in the cybersecurity space.
“Customers often tell us that the best way we can help them stay secure is to give them smarter tools that make it easier to get security right,” said Stephen Schmidt, CISO at Amazon Web Services, in the AWS press release.
“We designed Amazon GuardDuty to be so simple and cost effective that turning it on would be an easy choice for every AWS customer, regardless of their security expertise or the existing security services they use,” added Schmidt. “Amazon GuardDuty intelligently identifies hard-to-detect threats that might slip through the cracks of other security products and easily scales to meet the needs of any organisation, whether they have two AWS accounts or two thousand.
Several large enterprises have been quick to turn on the GuardDuty service, and endorse it.
“Security is a top priority at GE and ingrained in our company culture,” said Nasrin Rezai, vice president and global chief information and product security officer at GE, in the AWS press release. “GE runs thousands of applications on AWS. Deploying Amazon GuardDuty across our AWS global footprint required only a matter of hours and enhances our threat detection capabilities.”
To think, one of the world’s largest IT shops deployed GuardDuty globally in a single day.
With more than 50 percent of all cyber attacks launching on (often defenseless) small businesses, AWS is equally attractive to organisations that have fewer than 250 employees.
AWS is suddenly a new force to be reckoned with in the cybersecurity space.
