AWS has made its Control Tower and Security Hub services generally available to all customers, designed to make it easier for organisations to manage security policies across their cloud environments.
Both platforms aim to ease the process for organisations looking to shift over to the cloud by removing a great deal of the heavy lifting involved, something that is being echoed by rivals in the industry.
In the case of Control Tower, automated and preconfigured services allow organisations to deploy a set of guardrails for their cloud environment, safe in the knowledge that these are built to AWS best practices. Importantly, AWS isn't charging extra for this tool, and users can apply it to any AWS service that they currently pay for.
Once set up, organisations are able to build a secure AWS environment using these preconfigured best practices, defining policies around areas such as compliance and permissions. Control Tower should be especially useful for those organisations who need more prescriptive guidance on how to set up secure environments across multiple accounts, as the guardrails will prevent users from deploying tools that don't conform to security policies.
The second release this week, AWS Security Hub, aims to solve the problem having too many disparate security packages running across an organisation and being unable to manage them centrally. Now, AWS customers can access all security tools within a single dashboard view, including those provided by third-parties.
The platform is similar to those offered by rivals Microsoft and Google, in the form of Azure Security Center and Google Cloud Security Command Center respectively, however even smaller companies such as Box are pushing for all-in-one windows for security management.
The cloud giant says it already has companies such as GoDaddy, Rackspace, Splunk and PagerDuty, T-Mobile, Uber and Sony Interactive signed up to either Security Hub or Control Tower.
AWS Control Tower is available to all customers using US East (N Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) data centres, with additional regions coming in the near future.
While Control Tower is free, Security Hub is generally available to all customers on a per-usage pricing scheme, although there is a 30-day trial for new users.
