For the 11th successive year, Gartner has named AWS as their Magic Quadrant Leader. AWS’s leadership position is not news. AWS is well recognized for its flexible, secure and highly-available cloud environment. Many businesses rely on AWS to provide the infrastructure and services required to run their business applications securely and confidently in an ever-evolving business environment.

In addition to the many infrastructural advantages AWS provides, from data centers to ongoing innovations like Serverless, customers get the benefit of a network architected to secure information, applications, and identities. AWS provides services and features to help organizations meet core security and compliances, such as data-protection, data locality, and confidentiality.

Here are five key ways AWS helps take the burden of security off organizations’ shoulders.

Automation

Manual security tasks are time and resource intensive, AWS takes away this drudgery by providing services and tools to automate routine manual security tasks. This frees your resources to focus on core business requirements. And, of course, you only pay for the services you use.

AWS cloud services are regularly and rigorously vetted and have been consistently judged secure enough for secret workloads. This is also evinced by the fact that AWS customers include organizations handling highly sensitive data, for example, financial services, defence, insurance, etc.

Granular access control, even as you scale

AWS allows full control of where your data is stored and who can access it. It also shows you what resources are being consumed in real time. Such granular identity and access controls along with continuous monitoring for near real-time security information, ensures that only the selected resources get the right access, wherever your information is stored.

As you scale, you continue to reduce risk through security automation and activity monitoring. These services detect suspicious security events, such as. configuration changes, anywhere in your ecosystem. AWS also allows you to amp up your existing solutions with their services, to support existing workflows, ensure continuity of operations & simplify compliance reporting.

Vigilance

AWS team of security experts monitor its systems 24×7. Under this protection  you can confidently build on the most secure global infrastructure, with the full knowlledge that your data is under your full control: you own it, you can encrypt it, move it, and manage retention. Data across AWS is automatically encrypted before it leaves AWS facilities.

There are also additional encryption layers. And AWS provides tools that enable you to easily encrypt your data in transit and at rest. Only authorized users can access it, either with keys managed by AWS Key Management System (KMS) or your own encryption keys with CloudHSM using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs.

AWS lets you control where your data is stored (regions), giving you the control and visibility needed to comply with regional and local data-privacy, data-residency laws and regulations,.

Third-party integration

You can extend AWS capabilities with security technology and AWS consulting services of your own familiar and trusted solution providers. AWS offers a stable of providers with security expertise at every stage of cloud adoption, i.e. from migration to day-to-day management. You can also choose a provider from AWS Partner Network (APN), who specializes in delivering security-focused solutions and services for your specific workloads and use cases. Or to enable automation and agility and scaling with your workloads through APN partner solutions. Or find, buy, deploy, and manage cloud-ready software solutions in AWS Marketplace. All these offerings work together, helping you to secure your data in ways just not possible in an on-premises environment.

Compliance

AWS regularly monitors and secures 3rd party validation for global security and compliance standards for diverse industries, including finance, insurance, public sector enterprises, and more. These latest security controls, which are operated by AWS, beef up your own compliance and certification programs. AWS provides access to tools to run your own specific security assurance requirements, effectively saving you cost and time.

The list of security standards and compliance certifications, supported by AWS includes PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171—helping satisfy compliance requirements for almost any regulatory agency across the globe.