Amazon Inspector Finds Security Issues For You

Today at Amazon re:invent, Amazon announced a new service called Amazon Inspector that analyzes your AWS instances and reports back with any security or compliance issues it finds.

This provides a valuable service for Amazon customers who may be worried about security, especially those that are new to cloud services. The service does a complete review of your Amazon cloud and reports back with security and compliance issues it finds.

This could be particularly important for heavily regulated industries like finance and healthcare that have to stay in compliance with very strict government guidelines about how they store and use data.

The service generates a report with any vulnerabilities or areas where the service is out of compliance and even provides advice on how to fix those issues. The issues are grouped by severity so that customers can prioritize what to fix first.

Inspector also provides what it calls “Cloud Trails,” which is essentially an audit trail indicating what was found, what actions were taken and when, allowing auditors see exactly what happened.

As Andy Jassy, SVP at AWS said, this actually provides proactive security measures for Amazon customers and lets them see exactly where there could be issues before an issue actually happens. This proactive approach could appeal to those potential customers who might have been reluctant to move to the cloud, and to customers who simply want to find issues across their AWS instances.