AWS re:Invent 2024 - AWS Deep Dives into Cloud Security Innovation
Las Vegas is an oasis in the desert where people lose fortunes, couples get married, and conference attendees mingle, schmooze, and consummate major business deals. This past event was no different as the cloud and cybersecurity world descended upon Sin City to hear about the latest and greatest advancements in cloud innovation. With over 50,000 attendees worldwide gathering at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center, AWS re:Invent 2024 demonstrated its position as one of the largest and most influential cloud computing conferences globally.
Two Key Security Announcements
As always, with an event as big as AWS re:Invent, there are way too many announcements to be able to digest them all in real-time. While only a portion of the audience was cybersecurity-focused, the news in this area was impactful as AWS announced major threat-related security extensions to GuardDuty and a brand new security incident response service for its cloud customers. The focus of the security announcements was on providing mechanisms for security best practices, compliance, and threat detection in an easy-to-enable manner. AWS is pushing quickly into exposure management leveraging their distinct competitive advantages. Here’s some additional detail about the two announcements.
Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection
AWS made GuardDuty much smarter with their new Extended Threat Detection feature. This new offering uses AI to spot attack patterns across your cloud configuration and runtime logs that you might otherwise miss. Instead of just looking at one alert at a time, the new service connects the dots between different security signals (threat, alert, and runtime context) to catch attacks that unfold over time.
AWS has built AI models that can spot and group related security issues, making it easier for security teams to see the big picture when something's wrong. This is incredibly helpful when you're dealing with slow and low attacks that happen in stages across different parts of your cloud system. This improved GuardDuty solution provides visual maps of attack paths and suggests what to do next from a remediation perspective, helping teams tackle security problems faster. It's a great example of how AWS is stepping up its game with smarter, more automated security tools.
AWS Security Incident Response Service
AWS is investing heavily in security services to provide customers with the tools to adopt AWS workloads securely. This makes sense, as security is one of the historical limiting factors to cloud adoption. To help remedy any lingering concerns, AWS introduced a new Security Incident Response service, which brings order to the chaotic process of handling security incidents in a cloud environment. The new service provides a central hub for incident coordination, automatically collects relevant logs, and creates secure communication channels for SecOps and IR teams. While some initial setup is required to align the service with existing customer procedures and identities, it offers interesting capabilities for streamlining incident response workflows.
One of the service's strengths is reducing the manual overhead typically associated with incident response. It automates evidence collection, provides access to AWS security experts when needed, and helps coordinate team responses through built-in playbooks. Though organizations will need to invest time in learning and integrating the service effectively, it represents a significant step forward in helping teams manage security incidents more efficiently in their AWS environments.
Industry Trends and Insights
While the announcements launched at an event like AWS re:Invent are interesting, I’m always more intrigued by the overall trends and insights that can be gleaned from talking with AWS representatives as well as vendors on the show floor. After many interviews and rounds with staff engineers, technical evangelists, and founding teams a few cyber related threads emerged.
The Threat and Exposure Management market lacks definition. Market definition comes when buyers clearly indicate the capabilities and feature sets desired in products to solve a particular problem. Right now, the broader Threat and Exposure Management space is being filled by several vendors with different backgrounds. Each vendor has legacy baggage they believe will be the differentiator they can leverage to win in this highly competitive space. As the market position statement solidifies, some vendors will have to shed their rather significant baggage and slightly rotate into the newly defined space or be left behind with a technology that doesn’t have enough demand.
AWS's security strategy is directionally accurate. AWS understands the use cases for the security of its cloud platform better than anybody. This understanding gives the ability to see around corners and create a strategic entry into the cyber security market that appears at first glance to be a great fit for buyers. Leveraging their massive dataset around cloud asset configuration state will give them a significant competitive advantage over other cybersecurity offerings that do not have the same breadth of visibility. They will continue to expand their cyber security offerings through 2025, pushing other vendors to move more quickly or lose out on early mover advantage.
AWS execution leadership needs to become top-down. As everyone knows, Amazon works backward, executes from the press release first, and backs into their offerings from there. This works very well in creating bespoke solutions that solve individual problems and use cases for their user base. However, there are downsides to this approach, and the one I notice here is a lack of an overall strategy announcing their entry into a market that is highly competitive with some of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. Amazon’s work backward approach is really good at building tires, engines, car frames, and exhaust systems, but the question remains if this model is strategic enough for Amazon to sell a complete car. The solutions presented at AWS are each individually strong. Still, the question remains: Can they create a complete solution for the buyer to compete with the other major players in the cyber security platform arena? This answer to this question will come quickly as we move into 2025.
Personal Takeaways
AWS re:Invent is a fantastic event, and this year's iteration was stellar for me. The analyst relations team did an amazing job of making sure I was connected with the correct leadership team members to help me understand their direction and provide as much strategic help to them as possible. The talks are always top-tier, and the expo show floor is filled with the best cyber vendors. 2025 will be a big year for AWS cybersecurity products and solutions, so watch this area closely. The impact of this event on the space is meaningful, and if you haven’t made it to a re:Invent, I highly recommend you carve out the time next year!
Analyst Relations & Market Research Leader, Product Management & Marketing Executive
3dTyler, appreciate the AR shout out. Thanks for coming to re:Invent to engage with our security experts. Only six months until re:Inforce!
Does James Hamilton still give a talk during the Analyst Summit?