Amazon Web Services has a user interface that makes it a monster to manage. To view the status of deployments across thousands of instances on AWS is a complex, often manual process.
There is a new generation of companies that are making it visually easier to manage AWS deployments, the latest of which is Dome9. The company has developed a tool called Clarity that provides the capability to provide a visual map of a company’s security policies on AWS. The company does this by visualizing the AWS network virtualization environment, which provides a visual picture of an AWS virtual private cloud and security group configurations.
This is particularly helpful for organizations with large deployments on AWS. For these companies, keeping track of security policies gets particularly complex when trying to decipher the cryptic language and the seemingly infinite number of ports that have to be monitored when using the cloud service. It means that security administrators are constantly checking and re-checking to make sure everything is protected.
It gets particularly harrowing for people with DevOps or SecurityOps roles at fast-rising startups or enterprise operations that use the highly elastic AWS environment. Private data from a high-profile startup that gets exposed to the public can have tremendous impacts. It means the company did not live up to its privacy policy guarantee and potentially could face lawsuits and drops in its total users.
Dome9 is an established company with 500 customers on Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Soft Layer, now part of IBM), and HP Cloud. It competes with companies such as CloudPassage but I put it in a broader category of companies that offer visualizations on the AWS platform. These are companies such as CloudCheckr, Cloudability and Newvem, which was acquired last month by Datapipe.