AWS re:Inforce, the first security “training” event

The AWS re:Inforce 2019 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, with its more than 8000 attendees, in two days of information and entertainment was the ideal opportunity to meet experts and companies specialized in Cybersecurity and Cloud.

Steve Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer at Amazon Web Services said: “By 2025, around 75 billion devices will be connected to each other and on the internet, for a market of $11 trillion. Many of these devices are IoT, so their security will have to be guaranteed as never before”. This is Schmidt’s warning at the opening of the first edition of “Re:Inforce” which saw the consolidation of agreements and commitments to establish itself as a leader in a market where competitors are companies of the caliber of Oracle and Microsoft.

To ensure a secure future in the Cloud, the key word is security and consequently greater attention to data, but not only. In AWS’s vision, to ensure a secure future in the cloud, and consequently greater attention to the data it contains, we must move towards automation. According to Schimdt, it will be the software that will have to manage the processes, progressively removing them from the hands of human beings: “Everything that is paper, notes, manual operations, must be transformed into automation“. This concept, in fact, does not only have to do with the world of technology but concerns various sectors of life and work in the twenty-first century.

Iconic examples brought to the public at the Boston Convention Center by Schmidt. The first has to do (strange but true) with drugs, that is, with a US company that studies the impacts on people derived from the use of drugs, called Celgene. “Today,” said Schmidt , “thanks to the automation and power offered by the cloud, it only takes 4 hours to develop a model that used to take at least 2 months of work.” This means that the benefits of the Cloud can be enjoyed not only by companies that are always profit-oriented and speeding up processes, but also by companies or associations whose work aims to make this world better.

Another application of the Cloud that can be useful in the fight against corruption and terrorism is the fight against money laundering. “Today, there is a lot of fragmentation in the processes that lead to dirty money checks. With the application of cloud solutions, you can arrive at a single system that can monitor activities and track anomalies. In this way, Schmidt said, numerous unnecessary steps can be eliminated and in the future, threats and illegal behaviour can be detected automatically by a system that activates itself and intervenes”.

As a result, security and compliance have become increasingly popular and debated topics. For this reason, it is necessary to arrive at a sharing between infrastructure providers, developers, companies specialized in security. According to Schmidt, “you need to create an ecosystem where you’re always working with partners, with a security model that’s shared because customers need to know what they need to do and what we’re doing for them.”

At re:Inforce 2019 in Boston, however, unlike what happens at many events where customer fears are leveraged or where we only talk about sales, Schmidt reiterated that “Today, security and compliance are increasingly popular topics. That’s why we think there is a need for concrete advice for developers. But unlike many events, where customer fears are leveraged or where we only talk about sales, we wanted to do something different: we want to train programmers to improve and provide concrete examples on how to implement security in their solutions”