The much-anticipated Marketplace for Amazon Web Services (AWS) officially launched today. The marketplace has the potential to transform the way apps and services for the Amazon Cloud infrastructure are bought, provisioned and used. What the iTunes app store did for smartphone apps, the Amazon Marketplace could do for cloud apps and services.
With the launch of the Amazon Marketplace, one of the first security solutions available in the marketplace is the Alert Logic Threat Manager for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Building on the existing relationship between AWS and Alert Logic as well as the availability of Alert Logic security solutions and services, the Marketplace offering by Alert Logic “represents a major change in how customers acquire Alert Logic’s network security services. Customers seeking vulnerability assessment and intrusion detection can quickly provision Alert Logic Threat Manager for Amazon EC2, and immediately start protecting their infrastructure running on the AWS platform in a cost effective way.”
New management APIs from Alert Logic provide 100 percent automation for all provisioning functions, and customers will be able to purchase Threat Manager for EC2 via their regular AWS bill, using the same payment method they use for the rest of their AWS infrastructure. Misha Govsteyn, VP of Emerging Products at Alert Logic said, “Alert Logic Threat Manager for Amazon EC2 is completely self-service and flexible, making it possible for customers to provision new resources and easily scale up or down as their needs change.”
For apps and services in general, and cloud security related apps and services in particular, a marketplace in which they have to compete for the attention of users promises to change the way we consume security and how security companies design and deliver security solutions.
This was a subject that was discussed at a panel on cloud security that I chaired at the recent America’s Growth Capital Partners Conference in San Francisco. I was lucky to be surrounded by an all-star panel that included Gray Hall, CEO of Alert Logic, Simon Crosby of Xen, Citrix and now Bromium, Jay Chadury of Zscaler and Gary Fish of Fishnet. I will discuss this in another blog post to follow.
For now, the story is that the Marketplace for AWS is finally here and Alert Logic is one of the first security offerings available there.
