AWS re:Invent 2017

CTP's Robert Christiansen and Mike Kavis describe how to maximize the value of your AWS initiative. From building a Minimum Viable Cloud to establishing a cloud robust security and compliance posture, we walk through key client success stories and lessons learned. We also explore how CTP has helped Vanguard, the leading provider of investor communications and technology, take advantage of AWS to delight customers, drive new revenue streams, and transform their business. Session Sponsored by: CTP

Cloud migration in highly regulated industries can stall without a solid understanding of how (and when) to address regulatory expectations. This session provides a guide to explaining the aspects of AWS services that are most frequently the subject of an internal or regulator audit. Because regulatory agencies and internal auditors might not share a common understanding of the cloud, this session is designed to help you to help them, regardless of their level of technical fluency.

In this session, you learn how to adapt application defenses and operational responses based on your unique requirements. You also hear directly from customers about how they architected their applications on AWS to protect their applications. There are many ways to build secure, high-availability applications in the cloud. Services such as API Gateway, Amazon VPC, ALB, ELB, and Amazon EC2 are the basic building blocks that enable you to address a wide range of use cases. Best practices for defending your applications against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, exploitation attempts, and bad bots can vary with your choices in architecture.

Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help you protect your AWS accounts and workloads. It monitors for activity such as unusual API calls or potentially unauthorized deployments that indicate a possible account compromise. Enabled with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, Amazon GuardDuty can immediately begin analyzing billions of events across your AWS accounts for signs of risk. It does not require you to deploy and maintain software or security infrastructure, meaning it can be enabled quickly with no risk of negatively impacting existing application workloads.

Operating a security practice on AWS brings many new challenges that haven't been faced in data center environments. The dynamic nature of infrastructure, the relationship between development team members and their applications, and the architecture paradigms have all changed as a result of building software on top of AWS. In this session, learn how your security team can leverage AWS Lambda as a tool to monitor, audit, and enforce your security policies within an AWS environment.

Adversaries automate. Who says the good guys can't as well? By combining AWS offerings like AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Cloudwatch, AWS Config, and AWS Lambda with the power of Amazon Alexa, you can do more security tasks faster, with fewer resources. Force multiplying your security team is all about automation! Last year, we showed off penetration testing at the push of an (AWS IoT) button, and surprise-previewed how to ask Alexa to run Inspector as-needed. Want to see other ways to ask Alexa to be your cloud security sidekick? We have crazy new demos at the ready to show security geeks how to sling security automation solutions for their AWS environments (and impress and help your boss, too).

Every journey to the AWS Cloud is unique. Some customers are migrating existing applications, while others are building new applications using cloud-native services. Along each of these journeys, identity and access management helps customers protect their applications and resources. In this session, you will learn how AWS' Identity Services provide you a secure, flexible, and easy solution for managing identities and access on the AWS Cloud. With AWS' Identity Services, you do not have to adapt to AWS. Instead, you have a choice of services designed to meet you anywhere along your journey to the AWS Cloud.

This talk dives deep on how to build end-to-end security capabilities using AWS. Our goal is orchestrating AWS Security services with other AWS building blocks to deliver enhanced security. We cover working with AWS CloudWatch Events as a queueing mechanism for processing security events, using Amazon DynamoDB to provide a stateful layer to provide tailored response to events and other ancillary functions, using DynamoDB as an attack signature engine, and the use of analytics to derive tailored signatures for detection with AWS Lambda. Log sources include available AWS sources and also more traditional logs, such as syslog. The talk aims to keep slides to a minimum and demo live as much as possible. The demos come together to demonstrate an end-to-end architecture for SecOps. You'll get a toolkit consisting of code and templates so you can hit the ground running.

As Chick-fil-A became a cloud-first organization, their security team didn't want to become the bottleneck for agility. But the security team also wanted to raise the bar for their security posture on AWS. Robert Davis, security architect at Chick-fil-A, provides an overview about how he and his team recognized that writing code was the best way for their security policies to scale across the many AWS accounts that Chick-fil-A operates. The use of DevSecOps within Chick-fil-A led to the creation of a set of account bootstrapping tools, auditing capabilities, and event-based policy enforcement. This session goes over these tools and how they were built on AWS.

What do you do when leadership embraces what was called "shadow IT" as the new path forward? How do you onboard new accounts while simultaneously pushing policy to secure all existing accounts? This session walks through Cisco's journey consolidating over 700 existing accounts in the Cisco organization, while building and applying Cisco's new cloud policies. Learn valuable tips and hear about mechanisms used to automate the process. Gain insight into how Cisco integrates AWS's security and monitoring with Cisco's enterprise tools, Cisco SSO integration and continuous security auditability on Cisco's AWS account, and Cisco's CI/CD pipelines with AWS to ensure secure development.