Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) re:Invent was held last week in Las Vegas. AWS re:Invent is the public cloud provider’s annual event announcing new product and service launches. The event kicked off with a keynote from AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. One of the primary footnotes from his keynote introduced a fully managed zero-ETL integration with Amazon Aurora and Amazon Redshift. This gives customers using the Aurora database and the Redshift data warehouse the ability to move data without having to perform ETL.

The 5-day event included additional keynotes including Ruba Borno, Vice President of AWS Worldwide Channels and Alliances, as well as Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President, and CTO, of AWS. We have sorted through the various announcements, launches, and exciting news coming out of this year’s event. Below, I’ll share some of our key takeaways.

Cloud Security Was a Major Theme

Cyberattacks and ransomware continue to be escalating problems. 65% of organizations worldwide report an increase in attempted cyberattacks. Earlier this year, we covered updates regarding best practices for security and privacy, following AWS re:Inforce.

Now, cyberattack mitigation is a ubiquitous focus with preparation before a potential attack being just as important as dealing with an active threat. Amazon services like Amazon Inspector or Amazon GuardDuty can detect vulnerabilities or anomalous activity ahead of time. Amazon Inspector now supports AWS Lambda functions, adding continual, automated vulnerability assessments for Serverless compute workloads.

For Amazon Aurora, Amazon GuardDuty now offers threat detection to identify potential threats to data stored in Aurora databases. Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection profiles and monitors access activity to existing and new databases in your account. It uses tailored machine learning models to detect suspicious logins to Aurora databases accurately.

Read our blog: Benefits and Challenges of Managing Cloud Security

New AWS Security Services Announced

Amazon Security Lake was among the top new services announced at re:Invent. This is a purpose-built service that automatically centralizes an organization’s security data from cloud and on-premises sources into a specific data lake stored in your account.

Amazon Security Lake automates the central management of security data, normalizing from integrated AWS services and third-party services and managing the lifecycle of data with customizable retention and also automates storage tiering. Key features include

• Variety of supported log and event sources
• Data transformation and normalization
• Customizable data access levels
• And more

Furthermore, Security Lake supports two types of subscriber data access methods, Data access (Amazon S3) and Query access (Lake Formation). The preview release of Amazon Security Lake is now available in the US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland) Regions.

New CloudWatch Features

Several Amazon CloudWatch features were announced at re:Invent including:

• Logs data protection
• Cross-Account observability
• Internet Monitor

Amazon CloudWatch Logs data protection is a new set of capabilities for Amazon CloudWatch Logs leveraging pattern matching and machine learning to detect and protect sensitive log data in transit.

AWS also announced Amazon CloudWatch cross-account observability. This new capability provides the flexibility to monitor all the components of an application from a centralized view. It also allows you to search, analyze, and correlate cross-account telemetry data stored in CloudWatch such as metrics, logs, and traces.

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor is a new capability of CloudWatch that gives visibility into how an internet issue might impact the performance and availability of your applications. It allows you to reduce the time it takes to diagnose internet issues from days to minutes. Internet Monitor uses the connectivity data that AWS captures from its global networking footprint to calculate a baseline of performance and availability for internet traffic.

The Future of Business Transformation

Ultimately, re:Invent is about how AWS is helping customers across every industry drive business transformation. Whether that’s by improving access to AI and Machine Learning, enabling more powerful data storage and analytics, or by helping businesses take control of their data governance and security posture. With so many possibilities, it helps to have an AWS partner by your side that can provide the strategic guidance you need to navigate your own business transformation journey.

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