Amazon Web Services Inc. is making it easier for enterprises to protect their cloud deployments from hackers.

Ahead of its inaugural re:Inforce security conference in Boston today and Wednesday, AWS late Monday announced the general availability of Security Hub and Control Tower, two services that promise to simplify certain core aspects of network protection teams’ work. They’re launching seven months after the cloud giant first showed off a preview at re:Invent conference.

Security Hub is a monitoring console that enables administrators to get a central view of potential issues in their AWS deployments. It displays any suspicious activity that is detected in an environment, along with vulnerabilities such as applications with misconfigured encrypted settings. Items are prioritized based on importance so that companies can tackle the most urgent problems first.

Security Hub finds issues by aggregating data from the other security services on AWS, as well as more than 30 external tools. According to the cloud provider, the service spares administrators the hassle of constantly switching between tools and dashboards as they investigate potential threats.

Control Tower, the second service launched at re:Inforce, eases network protection teams’ work in a different way. It’s essentially a setup wizard that provides the ability to create new cloud deployments with predefined security settings provided by AWS.

By eliminating or at least reducing the need to configure security policies manually, Control Tower can lower the risk of human error and thus mitigate the risk of weaknesses getting introduced into an environment. The service should be especially appealing for enterprises running large AWS environments with a lot of moving pieces. As recent history has shown, it takes only one misconfigured storage repository or unprotected administrator account for data to be exposed.

AWS launched Security Hub and Control Hub alongside a couple of more specialized cloud protection features. The first, VPC Traffic Mirroring, allows companies to send the data flowing between their AWS-hosted applications to a threat scanning tool for analysis. It’s joined by new encryption options that are rolling out for File Gateway, a service used by AWS customers to let their on-premises applications store information in the cloud.

Not all of the announcements at re:Inforce focused on security. The cloud giant also unveiled a new integration with Coupa, a popular procurement management platform, that will help enterprises streamline the process of buying software on the AWS Marketplace for use in their cloud environments.

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, is covering the re:Inforce event this week from Boston, including interviews with AWS executives, partners and customers.

Photo: Aaron Sherrill/Twitter