A critical aspect of any cloud governance program is ensuring continuous compliance with regulatory requirements and maintaining audit readiness. In this post, we’ll dive into how to implement continuous compliance on AWS. We’ll cover the shared responsibility model, key AWS services for compliance, and best practices for automating compliance checks and evidence collection.

Understanding the Shared Responsibility Model

Understanding the shared responsibility model is crucial for cloud compliance. AWS is responsible for the security “of” the cloud, while customers are responsible for security “in” the cloud. This means AWS ensures the security of the underlying infrastructure, such as the physical security of data centers, network infrastructure, and virtualization layer. Customers are responsible for securing their applications, data, operating systems, and network traffic. From a compliance perspective, this means customers are responsible for ensuring their workloads meet applicable regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or GDPR. However, AWS provides a range of services and tools to help customers meet their compliance obligations.

The Shared Responsibility Model in an AWS Region

Key AWS Services for Compliance

AWS provides a suite of services designed to automate compliance checks and ensure audit readiness:

• AWS Config: Continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations. You can create Config Rules to automatically check for compliance with best practices and regulatory requirements.
• AWS CloudTrail: Records API calls and related events across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail logs provide an auditable history of actions taken on your account, which is critical for forensic investigations and demonstrating compliance.
• Amazon CloudWatch: Collects monitoring and operational data through logs, metrics, and events. You can use CloudWatch to monitor security events and set alarms for potential compliance issues.
• AWS Security Hub: Provides a comprehensive view of your high-priority security alerts and compliance status across AWS accounts. Security Hub aggregates findings from AWS services like GuardDuty, Inspector, and Macie.
• AWS Audit Manager: Continuously audits your AWS usage to simplify how you assess risk and compliance. Audit Manager automates evidence collection, making it easier to complete audits and meet compliance requirements.

Best Practices for Continuous Compliance

To implement continuous compliance on AWS effectively, consider these best practices:

1. Define Compliance Requirements: Work with your security, compliance, and legal teams to identify the specific regulatory requirements and industry standards that apply to your workloads. Document these requirements and map them to AWS services and features.
2. Implement Compliance as Code: Use tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform to define your infrastructure as code. Embed compliance checks and security best practices into your templates to ensure resources are provisioned compliant.
3. Automate Compliance Checks: Use AWS Config Rules to monitor your resource configurations for compliance continuously. Create custom rules based on your specific requirements or use pre-built rules from the AWS Config Rules Repository.
4. Collect and Analyze Logs: Use AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch to collect and analyze logs from across your AWS environment. Implement centralized logging and set up alerts for potential security or compliance issues.
5. Regularly Review and Assess: Regularly review your compliance posture using tools like AWS Security Hub and AWS Audit Manager. Identify gaps and remediate issues in a timely manner. Perform periodic risk assessments and penetration testing to validate controls.
6. Train and Educate: Provide training to developers, operations, and security teams on compliance requirements and best practices. Ensure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities in maintaining a compliant environment.

By following these best practices and leveraging AWS compliance services, you can implement a continuous compliance program that reduces risk and simplifies audit preparation.

How WEI Can Help

Achieving continuous compliance on AWS demands extensive expertise in security, compliance, and cloud operations. WEI’s Cloud Security and Compliance Services can help you design and implement a comprehensive compliance program on AWS. Our certified security and compliance experts can assist you with:

• Assessing your current compliance posture and identifying gaps
• Designing and implementing security controls aligned with regulatory requirements
• Automating compliance checks and evidence collection using AWS services
• Developing incident response and forensics capabilities
• Providing training and ongoing support to ensure continuous compliance

By partnering with WEI, you can ensure your AWS environment meets the highest standards of security and compliance, while freeing your team to focus on innovating and driving business value.

Conclusion

Continuous compliance is not just a regulatory requirement but a critical component of a robust cloud governance strategy. By leveraging AWS services and following best practices, organizations can ensure their cloud environments remain secure and compliant. Partnering with experts like WEI can further streamline this process, allowing your team to focus on innovation and business growth.

Next Steps: WEI, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, collaborates closely with customers to identify their biggest challenges and develop comprehensive cloud solutions. WEI emphasizes customer satisfaction by leveraging AWS technologies to enhance development, maintenance, and delivery capabilities.

Download our free solution brief below to discover WEI’s full realm of AWS capabilities.

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In the two previous posts in this series, we first explored the fundamentals of cloud governance and then followed up on strategies for managing shadow IT. A key theme throughout has been the importance of establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to centralize cloud expertise and drive governance across the organization.

In part three of this series, we’ll dive deeper into how to design and operate a successful CCoE. We’ll cover defining the purpose and composition of a CCoE, establishing a governance model, ensuring collaboration, and measuring success.

What is a Cloud Center of Excellence?

A CCoE is a cross-functional team that leads and governs an organization’s cloud adoption and operation. Its primary purpose is to accelerate cloud adoption by establishing best practices, enabling teams, and driving cultural change.

As the AWS whitepaper Overview of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework explains, a CCoE is comprised of two functional groups:

• The Cloud Business Office (CBO): Ensures cloud services meet the needs of internal customers and business services. Owns functions like organizational change management, governance, and cost optimization.
• Cloud Engineering: Owns infrastructure automation, operational tools and processes, security controls, and migration landing zones. Focuses on performance, availability, and security.

The CCoE helps the organization gain traction, provides expertise, and reduces risks in the initial stages of cloud adoption. However, it’s important to note that a CCoE is not always necessary, it depends on the organization’s specific challenges and context.

Determining the Lifespan of Your CCoE

One key decision in designing your CCoE is whether it will be a temporary or permanent team. The AWS blog post suggests that a CCoE is best thought of as a temporary enablement team, as the cloud will eventually become the “new normal” for the entire IT organization.

The functions of a CCoE, such as cloud platform engineering, security, and compliance, will eventually be absorbed into the broader IT organization as cloud maturity grows. The danger is creating a separate silo for the cloud that persists long-term.

However, some organizations maintain a permanent CCoE to continuously optimize cloud operations. The key is ensuring the CCoE enables rather than gates the rest of the organization. As the Microsoft Azure Cloud Adoption Framework states, when successful, a CCoE model creates a significant shift in IT, moving from a control and operations focus to a broker and enablement role.

Key Responsibilities of the CCoE

The primary duty of the CCoE team is to accelerate cloud adoption through cloud-native or hybrid solutions. Key responsibilities include:

• Helping build a modern IT organization using agile approaches
• Developing reusable deployment packages aligned with policies
• Maintaining a functional cloud platform aligned with operational procedures
• Reviewing and approving the use of cloud-native tools
• Standardizing and automating common platform components over time

To fulfill these responsibilities, the CCoE must collaborate closely with application teams, infrastructure teams, security, compliance, finance, and executive leadership. Establishing a regular meeting cadence and clear communication channels is critical.

Establishing a Cloud Governance Model

A core responsibility of the CCoE is establishing a cloud governance model. This includes:

• Defining policies and standards for security, compliance, cost management, etc.
• Establishing processes for provisioning, incident management, change control, etc.
• Clarifying roles and responsibilities across IT and business teams
• Selecting and implementing governance tools and technologies

The CCoE’s role includes creating an initial governance approach for the cloud, with a focus on automating policies and enabling teams. Over time, cloud governance should become integral to overall IT governance.

Ensuring Collaboration and Support

A CCoE requires ongoing collaboration and support from stakeholders across the organization to be effective. Some key strategies include:

• Securing executive sponsorship to champion the CCoE
• Building a cross-functional CCoE team with representation from IT, security, finance, and business units
• Engaging application teams early and often to understand and meet their needs
• Fostering open communication and providing training to build cloud skills

The CCoE should act as a partner and enabler to the business, not a gatekeeper. Building strong relationships and focusing on customer needs is critical. As VMware Tanzu advises, no matter what phase of cloud maturity you’re in, the CCoE can help improve visibility, drive optimization, maintain governance, and align the cloud strategy with business goals.

Measuring Success and Evolving

To ensure your CCoE is effective, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure its impact. Metrics may include:

• Cloud adoption rate: Track the percentage of workloads and applications migrated to the cloud over time. This measures the CCoE’s effectiveness in driving cloud adoption.
• Cost optimization: Measure the cost savings and avoidance achieved through the CCoE’s efforts. This could include savings from right-sizing resources, reserved instances, or automated shutdown of idle resources.
• Agility and time-to-market: Assess how the CCoE has improved the speed and agility of deploying new applications and features. Metrics could include the time from idea to production or the frequency of releases.
• Compliance and audit readiness: Evaluate the effectiveness of the CCoE in maintaining continuous compliance. Track the time and effort required to prepare for and pass audits.
• Customer satisfaction: Survey internal customers (application teams, business units) to gauge their satisfaction with the CCoE’s services and support. Use Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar metrics.

Establish a baseline for these KPIs and set targets for improvement. Regularly measure and report on progress to stakeholders.

In addition to quantitative metrics, also gather qualitative feedback from stakeholders. Conduct regular surveys, interviews, and workshops to understand what’s working well and areas for improvement.

Use these insights to evolve and optimize your CCoE continuously. Some areas to regularly reassess and iterate on include 1) Governance policies and processes, 2) Tooling and automation, 3) Skills and training, and 4) Organizational structure.

Remember, a CCoE is not a static entity. Its structure, focus, and services should evolve as the organization’s cloud maturity and needs change. Embrace an agile mindset and adapt the CCoE to continuously meet the needs of the business.

Getting Started

Building an effective Cloud Center of Excellence takes time and iteration. Start small, stay focused on outcomes, and scale as you learn. Some key steps to get started:

1. Define your CCoE’s mission and objectives
2. Secure executive support and assemble a cross-functional team
3. Assess current state and identify gaps in skills, processes, and tools
4. Establish an initial governance MVP and implementation roadmap
5. Communicate early and often to build awareness and gather feedback

By starting lean and delivering value quickly, you can demonstrate the impact of the CCoE and earn the trust and support needed for long-term success.

How WEI Can Help

Designing and operating a successful CCoE requires deep cloud strategy, architecture, security, and governance expertise. A trusted and proven partner like WEI can help with this.

WEI’s Cloud Strategy & Advisory Services help you align your cloud journey with business objectives. Our certified experts can assist you in developing a comprehensive cloud strategy and roadmap to accelerate innovation and drive value from AWS.

By partnering with WEI, you gain access to deep cloud expertise to help you build and operate a high-impact Cloud Center of Excellence. WEI is your trusted guide for cloud success from initial strategy through implementation and optimization.

Next Steps: WEI, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, collaborates closely with customers to identify their biggest challenges and develop comprehensive cloud solutions. WEI emphasizes customer satisfaction by leveraging AWS technologies to enhance development, maintenance, and delivery capabilities.

Download our free solution brief below to discover WEI’s full realm of AWS capabilities.

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In the first installment of this extended part series, we explored the fundamentals of cloud governance and best practices for establishing a robust governance framework on AWS. We identified shadow IT, which is the use of unapproved cloud services by employees, as a key challenge. In this article, we’ll dive deeper into strategies for managing shadow IT risks while fostering the agility and innovation the cloud enables. We will also focus on leveraging AWS services to improve visibility, automate policies, and provide secure self-service options.

Understanding the Risks and Causes of Shadow IT

Before we jump into solutions, let’s take a moment to understand the risks posed by shadow IT:

• Security vulnerabilities: Unsanctioned cloud services can expose sensitive data if proper controls are not in place. According to Gartner, through 2025, at least 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
• Compliance violations: Unapproved services may not meet regulatory requirements like HIPAA, PCI, etc.
• Inefficient spending: Redundant services and lack of volume discounts can drive up cloud costs.

So, what fuels the growth of shadow IT? Some common reasons include:

• Slow provisioning processes from central IT: When developers face long wait times to get resources, they are more likely to go around IT and use unapproved services to move faster. Cumbersome approval processes incentivize shadow IT.
• Lack of awareness about approved services: Employees often aren’t aware of all the approved tools available to them. Without clear communication from IT, they assume they need to find their own solutions.
• Desire to experiment with new technologies: Developers want to try the latest tools and services. When IT policies are too restrictive, employees may decide to experiment without approval.

The cloud has accelerated these issues by making it incredibly easy for anyone to spin up new services quickly, often without needing to go through IT. However, while the cloud enables shadow IT, it also provides powerful tools to help govern it.

Strategies for Managing Shadow IT on AWS

As an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, our cloud experts realize that AWS provides several services and tools that can help you discover shadow IT in your environment and mitigate the risks:

1. Gain Visibility with AWS Monitoring Tools

You can’t protect what you can’t see. AWS provides powerful tools to monitor your environment for unapproved activities:

• AWS Config: Continuously assess, audit, and evaluate configurations of AWS resources. Use Config Rules to detect policy violations, like unapproved instance types or unencrypted S3 buckets.
• AWS CloudTrail: Log, monitor, and retain account activity across your AWS infrastructure. Detect unusual API calls that could indicate shadow IT, like IAM user creation outside approved processes.
• Amazon GuardDuty: Continuously monitor for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior. GuardDuty uses machine learning to identify potential security issues.

2. Automate Policies with AWS Control Tower and Service Catalog

Establish guardrails and provision approved services in a self-service manner:

• AWS Control Tower: Set up and govern a secure, multi-account environment based on best practices. Enforce policies with preventive and detective guardrails.
• AWS Service Catalog: Create catalogs of approved resources that adhere to security and compliance requirements. Developers can quickly deploy from the catalog within defined guardrails.

3. Enable Secure Innovation with AWS Organizations

Provide builders with secure sandbox environments to experiment:

• Use AWS Organizations to programmatically provision new AWS accounts for teams to innovate. Apply baseline security policies using Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce guardrails across accounts.
• Integrate with AWS IAM Identity Center to centrally manage access to these sandbox accounts.

4. Leverage Landing Zones and Reusable Templates

Establish a secure foundation with a multi-account landing zone based on AWS best practices. Use tools such as:

• AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT): Provision a fully compliant landing zone according to your requirements using infrastructure as code.
• AWS CloudFormation: Create reusable templates for common architectures that adhere to security standards. Make these available via Service Catalog for developers to use.

5. Foster Open Communication and Training

Ultimately, managing shadow IT requires a cultural shift:

• Engage with business teams to understand their needs and why they may be tempted to use unapproved services. Work with them to find secure alternatives.
• Provide training on approved services, processes for requesting resources, and the risks of shadow IT. Make security engaging and relevant.
• Be transparent about the policies around shadow IT and the consequences of violations. Share examples of how shadow IT has led to security breaches.

By leveraging AWS’s powerful governance tools and following these featured strategies, you can effectively manage shadow IT risks while still enabling the agility and innovation that the cloud unlocks. The key is to automate guardrails, streamline provisioning, and work closely with builders to meet their needs in a secure manner.

In our next post, we’ll explore how to build a Cloud Center of Excellence to drive cloud governance best practices across your organization. Stay tuned!

Next Steps: In today’s cloud-driven world, ensuring meaningful security for an AWS environment is paramount for IT security leaders and the end users they protect. WEI Senior Cloud Architect & Strategist Keith Lafaso; presentsas he unveils the essential best practices to safeguard your cloud infrastructure. Listen below:

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Did you decide to come back for more after reading 7 Effective Practices For Multi-Cloud Cost Optimization? I’m glad you did. Now, let’s dive into the world of AWS cost optimization and explore some essential strategies to help you get the most value out of your cloud investments. In this blog post, we’ll cover a range of tips and best practices, from understanding your cost drivers to leveraging AWS tools and services for maximum efficiency. We’ll also discuss the importance of laying a solid foundation, utilizing real-time data, designing effective cost allocation strategies, and embracing a proactive approach to cloud cost management.

Know Your Cost Drivers

The first step in any cost optimization journey is understanding where your money is going. AWS provides a wealth of tools and reports to help you gain visibility into costs, such as AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Reports. Take the time to analyze your spending patterns and identify the key drivers of your AWS costs, such as EC2 instances, data transfer, or storage. Once you have a clear picture of cost drivers, you can start making informed decisions about where to focus optimization efforts. For example, if you notice that a particular application or workload is consuming a significant portion of your budget, you can investigate ways to optimize its resource utilization or consider alternative architectures.

Establish a Strong Foundation

Before diving into specific cost optimization techniques, it’s crucial to establish a strong foundation for your AWS environment. This means setting up your infrastructure in a way that maximizes value from your investments, improves forecasting accuracy, and continuously measures optimization efforts.

One key aspect of laying this foundation is defining clear goals and objectives for your adoption. What business outcomes are you aiming to achieve? How will you measure success? By aligning your cost optimization strategies with your overall business goals, you can ensure that your efforts are focused and impactful.

Another essential component is establishing the right processes and behaviors within your organization. Encourage a culture of cost awareness and ownership, where teams outside of IT are empowered to make informed decisions about resource consumption. Provide training and education to help everyone understand the impact of their actions on cloud costs. A rising tide lifts all boats!

AWS Networking Workshop With Keith Lafaso

Right-Size Your º£½ÇÖ±²¥

One of the most effective ways to optimize AWS costs is to ensure that you’re using the right size and type of resources for your workloads. Overprovisioning leads to unnecessary expenses, while under provisioning negatively impacts performance and availability.

Regularly review your EC2 instances and identify opportunities to right-size them based on actual usage patterns. AWS provides tools like AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Compute Optimizer to help you identify instances that are underutilized or overprovisioned. By adjusting your instance types and sizes, you can often achieve significant cost savings without compromising performance.

Leverage AWS Pricing Models

AWS offers a variety of pricing models to help you optimize your costs based on your usage patterns and commitments. For example, if you have predictable and steady-state workloads, you can take advantage of Reserved Instances to obtain significant discounts compared to On-Demand pricing. For workloads with flexible start and end times, Spot Instances can provide substantial cost savings of up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices.

By leveraging Spot Instances for appropriate workloads and implementing best practices like diversifying instance types and handling interruptions gracefully, you can unlock significant cost optimization opportunities.

Implement Auto-Scaling

The manual management of resources can be time-consuming and error-prone, leading to inefficiencies and wasted spend. By embracing automation and scaling techniques, you can optimize your resource utilization and costs.

Implement auto-scaling for your applications to dynamically adjust the number of instances based on demand. This ensures that you have the right amount of resources available when needed, while avoiding overprovisioning during periods of low traffic. Services like AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling make it easy to define scaling policies and automatically scale your resources.

Optimize Storage and Data Transfer

Storage and data transfer costs can add up quickly, especially as your data volumes grow. To optimize your storage costs, consider using the appropriate storage classes based on your data access patterns.

For example, Amazon S3 offers different storage tiers, such as S3 Standard, S3 Infrequent Access, and S3 Glacier, each with different pricing and retrieval characteristics. Implement lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects to lower-cost storage tiers when they are infrequently accessed. This helps you optimize costs while still maintaining the required level of data durability and availability.

For data transfer, minimize costs by keeping data within the same AWS region whenever possible. Leverage services like AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN to establish private network connections and reduce data transfer costs. If you need to serve content to a global audience, consider using Amazon CloudFront for content delivery and caching, which can help reduce data transfer costs and improve performance.

Utilize Real-Time Data and Actionable Insights

One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is access to real-time data. AWS provides a wealth of tools and services that enable you to monitor, analyze, and visualize cost and usage data. However, turning this data into actionable insights can be a challenge. We recommend to start by identifying the key metrics that matter most to your business. This could include things like cost per application, cost per customer, or cost per business unit. By focusing on the metrics that align with your goals, you can quickly identify areas for optimization.

Experiment with tools like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Reports to create visualizations and reports that make sense for your organization. Don’t be afraid to iterate and refine your approach until you find the insights that drive meaningful change.

Design Effective Cost Allocation Strategies

Effective cost allocation is essential for understanding the true value of your cloud investments and driving accountability across your organization. By accurately allocating costs to specific applications, teams, or business units, you can gain a clearer picture of where your money is being spent and identify opportunities for optimization.

When designing cost allocation strategy, consider factors like your organizational structure, business goals, and the level of granularity required. Tagging resources is a powerful way to enable fine-grained cost allocation, allowing you to slice and dice your cost data in meaningful ways. Cost allocation is not a one-time exercise. As your business evolves and your cloud usage changes, be prepared to adapt your allocation strategies to ensure they remain relevant and effective.

Embrace Proactive Cost Optimization

One of the most important shifts to make in your cost optimization journey is moving from a reactive to a proactive approach. Rather than waiting for unexpected spikes in your AWS bill to prompt action, proactively monitor and optimize your costs on an ongoing basis. Leveraging tools like AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to set up alerts and notifications when costs exceed predefined thresholds is one way to accomplish this. This allows you to quickly identify and address issues before they spiral out of control.

Regularly review your resource utilization and right-size your instances to ensure you’re not paying for more than you need. Take advantage of cost-saving opportunities like Reserved Instances and Spot Instances where appropriate.

Most importantly, make cost optimization a shared responsibility across your organization. Engage developers, operations teams, and business stakeholders in the process, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Continuously Monitor and Optimize

Cost optimization is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. It’s essential to continuously monitor your AWS costs and usage, and proactively identify opportunities for optimization.

Use tools like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to track your spending, set custom budgets, and receive alerts when costs exceed predefined thresholds. This means regularly reviewing cost and usage reports to identify trends and anomalies, and to take corrective actions as needed.

Engage your development and operations teams in the cost optimization process. Encourage a culture of cost awareness and provide training and best practices to help teams make informed decisions about resource usage. Implement tagging strategies to allocate costs to specific applications, teams, or business units, fostering accountability and enabling more granular cost analysis.

Conclusion

AWS cost optimization is a multi-faceted discipline that requires a combination of technical best practices, financial acumen, and organizational alignment. By following the best practices elaborated on above, you can effectively manage AWS costs and maximize the value of cloud investments.

Remember, cost optimization is a journey, not a destination. Stay proactive, stay curious, and keep exploring new ways to optimize your AWS costs. With the right strategies and mindset, you can unlock the full potential of the cloud while keeping your expenses under control. For any questions about cost optimization, please reach out to either myself or another WEI cloud solutions expert. By embracing these cloud cost optimization strategies and leveraging WEI’s expertise, you can unlock the full potential of cloud computing while maintaining a cost-effective and sustainable cloud infrastructure.

Next Steps: Enterprises are increasingly shifting to a hybrid cloud strategy to support and modernize their operations model. Learn why this is critical to meaningful digital transformation. Download our free whitepaper, to find out more.

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Cloud security is often viewed as a hindrance to productivity and agility, slowing down the ability to develop new applications and processes. However, when adopting a new cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), you must balance adequate cloud security with the cloud’s elasticity and scalability.

Fortinet Security Fabric provides the ideal components to build an autonomous services hub for AWS designed for various business needs. By concentrating on your cloud security services, your enterprise can protect its data and assets while ensuring consistent security policies across the entire infrastructure.

The Fortinet Security Fabric provides AWS cloud users with various security capabilities from a central location, leveraging a cloud-native ability to automatically scale and replicate services in other regions. Here are six ways can provide a balanced and secure cloud environment.

Fortinet For Your AWS Cloud Environment

1. Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) access control. With the FortiGate NGFW, you control who can access your enterprise’s data and what they are able to view. With a cloud services hub, restrictions can be based on cloud resource tags, IP addresses, TCP services, and application control policies for outgoing and incoming traffic.
2. VPN cloud connectivity. Secure the data your enterprise shares across resources with the cloud services hub. The cloud services hub can also use FortiGate NGFWs to establish and maintain secure VPN cloud connectivity from branch offices, other data centers, office locations, remote users, or even from organizational VPCs residing in the cloud. This ensures that all traffic is transmitted confidentially over shared resources.
3. Secure web gateway. With FortiGate you also have the ability to secure web gateways and reduce the risk of malicious communications. By using it as the exit point to the internet, the cloud services hub enforces acceptable internet usage policies for your employees while also reducing suspicious communications.
4. Web application security. Protect users’ personal details such as electronic payments or health information with FortiWeb web application firewall (WAF) as part of your cloud services hub.

Used as the entry point for internet traffic accessing web-based applications, a central set of WAF security policies protects business-critical applications while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, such as the (PCI DSS) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

5. Email security. With Fortinet’s FortiMail deployed on demand, you can have peace of mind that you have a backup and secure email gateway (SEG) for your enterprise. FortiMail provides security and flexibility for global email deployments without having to worry about availability.
6. Sandboxing. Protecting cloud environments from zero-day attacks is growing increasingly important for enterprises. FortiSandbox can integrate with FortiGate to scan any in-line traffic as part of the cloud services hub. It can help protect applications by leveraging the FortiSandbox JSON API. FortiSandbox also has the capability to scale to Amazon S3 cloud storage buckets, via lambda functions. With the available collaboration tools and the increasing use of public file and image repositories, the ability to safely test suspicious code and expose new threats is more relevant than ever.

Using the Fortinet Security Fabric for your enterprise’s AWS cloud environment provides you with a balanced solution that combines cloud security with the ability to remain flexible and scale to organizational needs.

Contact WEI today if you’re ready to deploy Fortinet for your AWS cloud environment. Our experts will help you determine which services your enterprise needs to maximize cloud security and agility.

Next Steps: Learn more about Fortinet cloud security options by downloading our latest tech brief, “.”

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How much data is your enterprise creating and what are you doing about it? For most companies, data is being created, and subsequently stored, at faster and faster rates. However, many enterprises lack the tools to properly utilize and take advantage of their data, especially those that are still struggling with just the part of the equation.

As technology has advanced, we’ve moved from storing information on tapes to disks and now, in modern times, the cloud. By utilizing the cloud for data storage and processing, enterprises gain great benefits, but no solution is without its costs.

The main issue comes when the data stored on the cloud needs to be utilized by services on-prem or in the data center. is helping to solve this problem and liberate enterprises from the confines of data siloes with their new Keep reading to learn how this solution is redefining cloud data storage.

Find Freedom In Data Management

While a vast majority of enterprises are utilizing the cloud for some amount of data storage, few have utilized it for critical file data, often citing difficulties in moving it one way or the other. As a result, the data lives separately than the applications that need it, reducing the effectiveness and utilization of this data. To get around this problem, some IT teams have re-built workflows to use data while it’s in the cloud, but this comes with its own set of problems.

The bottom line is there hasn’t been a simple solution to solve these cloud data storage and utilization issues… Until now.

Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3 allows IT teams to fluidly move data to and from Amazon S3 with just a few clicks, simplifying the cloud storage process and streamlining interactions with other Amazon Web Services as well.

“I like to think of [Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3] as the easiest way for customers to put their file data to work with all the amazing marketplace apps and cloud native services on AWS,” said Qumulo Technical Marketing Manager David Sniderman, with ESG Senior Analyst Scott Sinclair. “Our file system is designed to help users take advantage of the cloud’s scalable infrastructure for high performance data processing and content creation. Shift lets customers take that data, wherever they create it, and use it with AWS Cloud Service.”

With Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3, Qumulo customers, whether cloud native or creating data on prem, can take that valuable file data and use it with Amazon’s full suite of cloud services.

Why Enterprises Choose Qumulo Shift For Amazon S3

In addition to this simplified data management, enterprises will experience a variety of other benefits, including:

• Improved data availability for your users, wherever they might be located. In a time when many businesses are utilizing remote or , this is a benefit that cannot be overestimated.
• Realtime visibility and control over data and users. Potential issues can be found quicker and any decisions that must be made regarding the management of data will benefit from a full and accurate picture of the current data environment.
• Better data reliability and protection. Thanks to Qumulo’s distributed file system, which aggregates and protects cloud storage, enterprises never have to worry about files lost in the cloud. Secondary copies of data are created by native replication, which adds an additional layer of data protection.
• Lowered total cost of ownership (TCO). In comparison to legacy solutions, Qumulo Shift for Amazon S3 costs less and offers a higher percentage of provisioned capacity.
• Flexibility. Qumulo offers a flexible deployment model, allowing enterprises to create the environment that best suits their performance and capacity needs.

At the heart of it, is making it easier for enterprises to keep their data next to their applications, allowing it to be utilized to meet business objectives.

Are You Interested In Qumulo Shift For Amazon S3?

As a leader in data management, Qumulo is trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major film and animation studios, and some of the largest research facilities around the world. From building smart cars, to vital disease research, enterprises around the world are changing the way they store and utilize data thanks to Qumulo. Our team has experience implementing Qumulo for enterprise companies that process and analyze vast amounts of mission-critical data across several industries. today to learn more about how Qumulo can quickly add value to your data storage environment and strategy.

NEXT STEPS: Check out our latest infographic which shares 7 ways Qumulo is making cloud data storage radically simple. PLUS it includes a case study example of how one of our customers found success leveraging Qumulo with AWS. Click below to learn more.

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