In a digital world increasingly fraught with security challenges, Amazon Web Services Inc. has a message for the enterprise community: Come to us, and we’ll make it easy to set up and secure valuable data in a cloud computing environment.

Late Monday, AWS announced general availability for its Control Tower and Security Hub services after a preview period of seven months. The services provide a dashboard view of AWS’ own security tools and automate the process of setting up secure and compliant environments.

“Amazon is clearly showing their cards here,” John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, said during the AWS re:Inforce event in Boston. “The security industry is responding well to it because they want to rely on Amazon. Security is looking a lot more like cloud than cloud looking like security.”

Furrier was joined by co-host Dave Vellante, and they discussed AWS’ focus on protection against future vulnerabilities and positioning the cloud as a safer alternative, even for the nation’s top intelligence agency (see the full interview with transcript here).

Need to encrypt IoT data

The new tools announced by AWS this week were designed to bolster the cloud provider’s position in the security arena as companies look for safe havens to store workloads and data. This will become even more important as internet of things devices continue to grow in use, generating exponentially more information in the process.

“Ninety percent of IoT data is plain text in the form of HTTP, so it is not encrypted,” Vellante noted. “Amazon is going hard after that. They are going to bring tooling to that problem.”

With the introduction of newly available tools and a future focus on additional vulnerabilities, such as IoT data, AWS is sending a message of faith in the cloud to the security industry.

“The head of information technology at the CIA said security in the cloud on its worst day is better than client server systems on their best day,” Vellante said. “This narrative of ‘The sky is falling’ that you always hear from security vendors is not what Amazon is projecting. What Amazon is projecting is that the state of the cloud union is strong.”

Here’s the complete analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Inforce event:

Photo: AWS