Why should customers choose cloud security over managing on their own?

Given the prevalence of cyber-attacks, high demand for cyber expertise, and an overabundance of vendors and solutions to choose from, many small and medium-sized businesses find managing their own security is high-risk, costly to monitor and maintain, and a burden on their limited IT resources.

Managing security in the cloud allows customers to safeguard their operating environment and customer and corporate data without compromising performance, cost, and optimal architecture.  Migrating to the cloud allows customers to automate manual security tasks so they can shift their focus to scaling and innovating their business. And with cloud services, customers only pay for what they use.

How does AWS help customers’ organization security?

Moving to the cloud has big benefits, especially when customers work with an experienced cloud solutions provider. As an AWS customer, customers can:

• Improve their ability to meet core security and compliance requirements while benefiting from a network architected to protect their information, identities, applications, and devices.
• Analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities, giving customers the control and confidence, they need to securely run their business, without the costly overhead.
• Access a comprehensive set of services and features that gives organizations of any size the ability to efficiently meet core security and compliance requirements, such as data locality, protection, and confidentiality without building a staff of security experts.
• Have a comprehensive view of high-priority security alerts and security posture in a single place that aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes your security alerts.
• Achieve a high level of automation, enabling customers to reduce human configuration errors and give their team more time to focus on other work critical to their business. AWS’ comprehensive range of solutions allows customers to automate tasks in novel ways, making it easier for their team to collaborate and more quickly and securely deploy code.

 What are the benefits of AWS solutions?

• Real savings customers can see and measure: Moving to the cloud provides the ability to reduce costs while increasing efficiency. Migrating with AWS leads to an average cost savings of 31 percent. AWS has reduced costs more than 100 times over the last decade, returning more than half a billion dollars to our customers.
• A high level of cloud security: AWS security infrastructure is built to satisfy the highest requirements of the world’s leading financial, educational institutions, and governmental institutions that rely on it—ensuring customers have the same level of security they do. Amazon customers report on average 43.4% fewer monthly security incidents, and 69% reduction in unplanned downtime.  
• Capacity and scalability that grows as you need it: AWS automatically adjusts cloud capacity to meet demand, while only charging for what customers actually use, ensuring customers have the space to grow without paying for more than they need. Customers have visibility into what they are spending and solutions designed for their business-specific needs.
• Built-in reliability and resiliency: AWS provides a reliable cloud, resulting in customers achieving a 69% reduction in unplanned downtime. AWS has a track record for being a high-availability cloud, and brings the experience and frameworks to ensure business continuity, including dedicated teams and partners who can provide on-demand expertise and support.
• Support through best-in-class partners, programs, and training: Customers need to maximize IT performance with limited budgets and resources. AWS can help customers plan, scope, and size their projects and offers a free, comprehensive library of digital, self-paced training courses, and a range of skill certifications, workshops, and immersion days for customers’ teams. Further, thousands of AWS certified partners and consultants are available to provide customers with premier service—no matter their budget.
• A broad, deep, and constantly growing set of capabilities: When customers partner with AWS, they continuously gain new, simple, trusted, and accessible solutions that enable customers to store and protect their data, empower their workforce to collaborate securely from anywhere, build websites and applications, better serve customers throughout their lifecycle, and gain new insights from their data and more--without having to make their own investments in capital and talent.

 Can AWS help customers with compliance?

Yes! AWS regularly achieves third-party validation for thousands of global compliance requirements that help customers meet security and compliance standards for finance, retail, healthcare, government, and beyond. With AWS, customers get access to the same security controls that AWS uses on its own infrastructure, which strengthens customers’ own compliance and certification programs, while also giving access to tools they can use to reduce their cost and time to run their own specific security assurance requirements. AWS provides activity monitoring services that detect configuration changes and security events across a customer’s system, even integrating with their existing solutions to simplify their operations and compliance reporting. Finally, AWS allows on-demand access to more than 2,500 security controls with an automated compliance reporting tool.

Can customers keep their current security tools with AWS?

If a customer’s organization has already invested in tools that manage some or all of the cybersecurity spectrum, including access control, threat detection and mitigation, compliance, and network and application protection, there is no need to lose their investment in those tools. AWS is agnostic, flexible, and open – AWS has their own solutions but also has a large network of integration-ready partner solutions.

How can customers get started?

Customers can request an AWS security assessment. Security is a journey of continuous improvement, and even if customers have already gotten started, it is hard to know if customers are adequately protected. AWS can help customers by providing an AWS Security Assessment where a customer’s network, software, data, and devices will be evaluated against industry standards and the AWS framework. The customer’s report will give them an overall risk score, identify gaps, and provide a roadmap for what to address immediately and how to improve over time. 

Small and medium-sized businesses can be easy targets for attackers, but they don’t have to be. Deploying the AWS Security Solutions in the cloud helps businesses like your customers’ immediately reduce risk and benefit from enterprise-grade protection that is easy to manage and sized for your customers’ business.