AWS CISO: Why our new Security Lake is a game-changer for the industry

The recent AWS re:Invent 2022 event in Las Vegas saw the cloud giant unveil a host of new releases across its technology portfolio, but this year, one of the biggest launches was about keeping data safe.

Amazon Security Lake is a new security-focused data lake service aimed at helping users get more out of their security information, looking to centralize all of an organization’s cloud and on-premise security data into a single location, and will make it easy for security teams to automatically collect, combine, and analyze it on a petabyte scale.

Speaking to TechRadar Pro at the event, CJ Moses, CISO and VP of security engineering, AWS, was perhaps unsurprisingly keen to highlight the importance of the launch, calling Security Lake “the cornerstone” of the company’s security-themed announcements at the event.

Amazon Security Lake

“This is the big game-changer,” he says. “There is nothing else like it in the industry – that’s why we had to build it…there are other data lakes, there’s other security data lakes, but they’re beholden to the analytics platform that’s providing – and that’s not how we roll.”

Built on Amazon S3, the company says new analytics can be created, “in just a few clicks”, letting security teams drill down precisely into potential security threats.

“We wanted to be an open platform with an open schema that’s open source so that everyone can use it, regardless of providers or otherwise,” Moses notes.

With security threats ever-present for many businesses, the responsibility of keeping such a large (and broad) customer base safe is an incredible load to bear.

However, Moses is not put off by the task, noting that AWS and its employees are used to working on a large scale, with a company culture based around fixing things:

“I don’t look at it as a burden… if you’re used to operating in a certain way, and doing certain things, you become accustomed to it”.”

He notes that the threat landscape is increasingly turbulent, with the global geo-political situation and macro-economic worries making criminals increasingly desperate.

“When people aren’t able to put food on the table, they’ll do dire things,” he notes, highlighting an uptick in threats on the internet as a whole.

“Everything that happens from a threat perspective, there’s always a human behind the keyboard, and those humans have motivations – you have to look at those motivations, and determine what level of threat they are, and subsequently how much risk we carry from those actors.”

“We’re keeping bad things from happening to good people, not just across our cloud, but the entire environment.”