• AWS Competency Program expansion also includes threat detection and response, application security, perimeter protection, and core security.
  • “It’s no secret that security can be pretty hard in any environment,” Ryan Orsi at AWS told SDxCentral.
  • AWS will continue to expand on the competency program as thread vectors change, according to Orsi.

AWS has enhanced and relaunched its Security Competency Program so that it encompasses a host of cybersecurity challenges enterprises face on a daily basis, including identity and access management, threat detection and response, infrastructure security, data protection, compliance and privacy, application security, perimeter protection, and core security. 

Separately, the company also introduced a new competency, the AWS Level 1 Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) Competency, which includes six new specialization categories to help customers discover partner solutions that have been validated for 24/7 monitoring and response services. 

“We want to assist customers in avoiding security jargon so they can pinpoint the third-party software needed to support them — all, of course, validated by AWS,” said CJ Moses, CISO and VP of security engineering at AWS, during his keynote at the AWS re:Inforce event today in Boston.

Based on customer feedback, AWS redesigned its competency program so that it is organized into eight categories that address over 40 customer use cases, according to Moses.

“The AWS Security Competency program helps AWS customers easily identify software and service partners that have expertise in specific security categories.

“It's no secret that security can be pretty hard, in any environment — cloud, on-premises, doesn't matter,” Ryan Orsi, global partner practice team lead for security consulting and MSSP at AWS, told SDxCentral.

“With the combination of these two programs, we believe we're making it a lot, lot easier, if not the easiest place to be for customers, because they're given now sort of a one-stop-shop experience, where they can now find security software that works for their specific environment,” said Orsi, adding, “They can find companies that can help them install it and deploy it and even train their staff on how to use it.”

IBM is one member of the MSSP Competency. The company’s Program Director Security Strategy AWS RouteMarket, Michael Sanders, told SDCentral via email, "The AWS Level 1 MSSP program enables clients to identify IBM as a partner to help mature their cloud security readiness and position them to become an enabler for business innovation and modernization initiatives."

Wesley Mullins, chief technology officer at Deepwatch, another MSSP partner, told SDxCentral, “Working with AWS allows us to provide security services with the speed, agility and scalability required to respond quickly in today’s volatile threat landscape.”

The AWS partner programs will continue to grow, according to Orsi. “Our team is going to be laser focused on making sure that we align the Security Competency community and the Level 1 MSSP Competency community … because as new innovations arise, so do new security vectors, and we're gonna make sure that we're right in front of that.”

He continued, “This was so needed for us, for a cloud provider, to really help them eliminate a lot of the ambiguity there is in general in the security industry. This really kind of cut through the ambiguity.”