UPDATED 14:29 EDT / NOVEMBER 19 2013

NEWS

Implementing stringent security solutions atop AWS | #reinvent

John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, attended the AWS re:Invent 2013 conference in Las Vegas where they broadcasted live a series of interviews with the tech key people of the hour. Munjeet Singh, Principal – Emerging Technologies – Dynamic Infrastructure with Booz Allen Hamilton, joined them in theCUBE, for a chat about the cloud and the security issues recently addressed for the public sector clients.

“We have a big focus on public sector clients, and we have some private sector clients as well. When you think about cloud adopters you would think that certain agencies in the government would be some of the biggest critics of migrating their workloads there, but the incremental steps that Amazon has taken over the past few years have really eased people’s worries around those concerns. It started with the integration of VPC (virtual private cloud), which allows the clients to extend their data center into the Amazon cloud,” said Singh.

Speaking about public sector organizations and their willingness to adopt the cloud solutions, Singh stated that recent technology breakthroughs and regulations have paved the path towards that goal.

“Amazon released GovCloud, a solution that was primarily targeted at public sector clients; it basically made a community cloud that was dedicated to government clients.Everybody working the system in the Amazon data center is a US citizen – that helps from from a compliance perspective. Then they came up with a program called FedRAMP, which allows the agencies to do what’s called ‘information assurance reciprocity’. A lot of the changes that have been introduced recently – the HSMs (hardware security models), that allow cryptology and different levels of encryption, are really starting to address some of the concerns. We have clients in the financial sector who are using GovCloud because they like the level control has been introduced,” explained Singh.

On the same topic of security issues and Government organizations, Furrier mentioned the IBM and Amazon battle to win the cloud services contract for the CIA. IBM scored higher on management, but overall Amazon scored higher and there was a tie on security. “It’s a huge validation for Amazon,” stated Furier, prodding Singh to comment on that deal.

“I’m not involved at all with that market, but I’d love to see how it was constructed and what types of justifications they used in order to pursue a public cloud provider,” admitted Singh. “The government goes through an evaluation criteria and they rank various issues. I’d be interested to see if the reason IBM scored higher on management was that they were willing to take more managed services approach, whereas Amazon typically does not: they give you the platform and the tools but then you have to figure out the right kind of operational context.”

Further explaining how his company operates, Singh added: “Even with hardware security modules, even with FedRAMP and GovCloud, our clients do want to see some more stringent security controls implemented. We have a secure cloud gateway approach that we use which allows us to audit every single transaction that goes in and out of a cloud instance from an on-premise data center. It’s been really successful in deploying that with our clients, and we also have an Identity analytics intelligence solution that we’re developing; once we authenticate somebody through a cloud broker we can assign a risk rating to them and depending on their activities inside that cloud we can start to adjust their risk rating.”

“We bring customized solutions, trying to implement stringent, more fortified your security solutions on top with Amazon just to raise their comfort level even more and to give our clients a little bit more control,” clarified Singh.


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