Even though top providers such as Amazon.com Inc. spend considerably more resources on securing their environments than the majority of traditional IT organizations, many CIOs still mistrust the public cloud. Recognizing an opportunity, FireEye Inc. is looking to elevate some of those concerns with a new release of its flagship security service that works with the retail giant’s market leading infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The FireEye Threat Analytics Platform (TAP) represents the security powerhouse’s attempt to expand beyond the threat analysis market where it had its first big break into the more lucrative intrusion prevention systems area. The cloud-based offering combines the firm’s homegrown Multi-Vector Virtual Execution engine, which filters traffic for advanced malware, with the forensics and end-point protection technology it obtained as part of the $1 billion acquisition of long-time partner Madiant Corp. earlier this year.

The addition of support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) extends the capabilities of the offering beyond on-premise infrastructure to the public cloud, which is seeing a growing influx of enterprise workloads that need protection comparable to that which enterprises provide in-house.

To that end, TAP provides integration with CloudTrail, the free logging tool Amazon launched last November to give users a way to monitor how applications are accessing public cloud environments. The service periodically generates activity records that FireEye says can be fed into its platform to identify malicious activities.

The resulting insights are correlated with the real-time data TAP collects from other deployments to provide an up-to-date view of the threat landscape, according to the company. This can be useful for spotting coordinated attacks and reducing the risk of false positives. Organizations can also use the platform to combine AWS logs with security information from their on-premise environments for insight into breaches that exploit multiple vulnerabilities across the network.

The release of TAP on the world’s most popular infrastructure-as-a-service platform marks a major milestone for FireEye, which now has access to a broad market that is growing at an accelerating rate. The move also positions the firm to better address the requirements of the large organizations that make up its existing customer base, which are seeing their environments become increasingly heterogeneous and distributed as lines-of-business flock to the public cloud.

photo credit: perspec_photo88 via photopin cc