Amazon Unveils Macie, An AI Monitoring Service For AWS

More specifically, for Amazon S3. But AWS has now finally caught up with competitors on this front, with the unveiling of Amazon Macie, an artificial intelligence based cloud monitoring service.

It has been designed to discover and classify sensitive data in Simple Cloud Storage Service, the company’s storage platform, and automatically send alerts to users to notify them of unusual activity and exposures.

Macie utilizes machine learning to help customers using the AWS cloud prevent inadvertent exposure of sensitive data, as well as keep a check on unauthorized access to data stored in S3. Amazon plans to support additional AWS storage services later this year.

The world’s leading cloud company announced this new security service at an event in New York on Monday — its annual NY Summit.

This useful new tool is partly built on the technology from Harvest.ai, the San Diego based technology startup that Amazon acquired in January.

Amazon Macie will look for sensitive data like passwords that are stored on AWS, and apply risk ratings to the different collections of data. It will alert the user in case it detects unusual access patterns that might indicate a security threat.

This introduction gives Amazon Web Services an answer to the Threat Detection technology that is already available to Microsoft Azure customers. Google, the third biggest name in public cloud also recently introduced a tool to spot and redact sensitive data.

AWS says that this fully managed service uses machine learning to monitor how data is accessed and look for any anomalies. To do this, Macie continuously monitors new data that comes into S3.

It automatically detects certain types of data like names, addresses, credit card numbers, and birth dates. All of which then flows into a central dashboard that highlights high risk files, as well as information on how users and other applications are accessing the data.

As is so often the case with AWS services, pricing for Macie is complicated, and based on the number of events and data it processes every month. The first month will likely be the most expensive for users.

The service is only available in the US East and US West regions, though more AWS locations are only a matter of time.