Amazonia for February 25, 2019
February 25, 2019
Several yellow flags flapped in the wind last week. In two conversations with conference organizers focused on the law enforcement and intelligence markets, I learned there was little interest in Amazon’s policeware services. I found this interesting but understandable. Amazon’s “footprint” is much larger in the eCommerce mindspace and recent news has been dominated by Amazon’s response to some New Yorkers’ protests over tax breaks for a cash rich, profitable company. Another factor is the ongoing background buzz about the suddenly personal life of Amazon’s founder. Nevertheless, DarkCyber Annex believes that Amazon is likely to be a disruptive force in what we call policeware and intelware. A few highlights from last week’s Amazon team:
Do Not Fear Amazon
“We’re from Amazon. We’re here to help you.” Jeff Bezos appears to be spending some cycle time promulgating these messages to employees. CNBC reported that “Jeff Bezos told employees that fear of Amazon is overblown.” According the CNBC:
Fears of Amazon taking over the world have reached a fever pitch in recent years. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Amazon was the most mentioned company on earnings calls of S&P 500 companies. But some of Amazon’s primary competitors are finding ways to survive and even thrive against one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Evidence is the positive financial performance of Wal-Mart and the number of misfires Amazon video has delivered. Also, Microsoft is catching up with Amazon cloud services. Rest easy.
Amazon Expands Its Threat Detection
There are many specialist companies — many of which will be acquired or just go out of business. Amazon is aware of this market. One possible reason is that many threat detection firms use Amazon’s infrastructure to provide their for fee services. It seems logical that Amazon would compete in this sector. InfoQ reported that Amazon had added three new threat detection services to its cyber security offerings. Amazon brands this initiative as GuardDuty. Infoq explains the service this way:
Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service available on AWS that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help customers protect their AWS accounts and workloads. When a threat is detected, the service will send a detailed security alert to the GuardDuty console and AWS CloudWatch Events – thus making alerts actionable and easy to integrate into existing event management and workflow systems.
Amazon’s spin is that its existing customers can use these services. However, scope creep is likely to occur. Amazon may compete with some of its customers as it expands its revenue streams in this lucrative market.
Graphus Becomes AWS Partner
It’s difficult to keep track of the companies racing to become AWS partners. We noted that Virtual Strategy reported that Graphus is on the Bezos team. Graphus is a cyber security firm.
Ethereum Service Enhancement
Many individuals in government are not aware that Amazon is a player in the burgeoning digital currency game. Amazon is a player and an increasingly important one. Ethereum World News reported that Amazon supports deployment of VeChain Thor (VET) DApps with almost one click simplicity. What does this digital currency jargon mean? One one hand, an Amazon customer can deploy his or her own blockchain application without having to do bare metal coding. In terms of law enforcement, the expanding Ethereum services signal that data flowing into the through the Amazon system may well be of significance when it comes to identifying certain interesting behaviors. This development complements a managed blockchain service and a quantum ledger database.
Amazon Subsidies
A surprising subsidy from Smartronix reduces the cost of AWS cloud migrations has been reported by Globe Newswire. The idea is to reduce the cost of AWS migration for Virtual Machines (VM) running on VMware. For projects with a minimum of 500 VMs, the migration will be free (completely funded), with partial subsidies offered for smaller projects. In short, this is a play to get big installations. The idea is that organizations will be able to use the same tools and management capabilities they are using today, including VMware provisioning, storage, and lifecycle policies.
Amazon Snow Globe for Elastic Cloud Services
It is now possible to run an application within Amazon. The innovation is described in “Setting Up PrivateLink for Amazon ECS and Amazon ECR.” The idea is that “all the network traffic within the AWS network. When you create AWS PrivateLink endpoints for ECR and ECS, these service endpoints appear as elastic network interfaces with a private IP address in your VPC.” The idea is a variation on the catchphrase “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. The Amazon edit becomes “What happens in AWS stays within AWS.”
Amazon Funds Computer Science Programs
Free training? Sounds like a promising offer. PC Magazine reports that Amazon will fund computing courses for under privileged teens. The online news service said:
More than 1,000 high schools across the US through its Future Engineer program [will receive funding]. Of those schools, more than 700 are classified as Title 1, meaning a high percentage of their students come from low-income families.
But anyone can become an Amazonia for Just head to Geek Deals and pay $35 for the AWS Certified Architect Developer Bundle 2019, now discounted by over 90 percent.
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