Cloud Computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. Cloud Computing providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) own and maintain the network-connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application.

April 19th, AWS announced that Amazon Inspector, an automated security assessment service, has completed its preview phase and is now generally available to all customers. Amazon Inspector helps customers improve the security and compliance of their applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by identifying potential security issues, vulnerabilities, or deviations from security standards.

Consumers will welcome the new service because Amazon is offering it with no up-front costs, it’s easy to deploy, has no infrastructure to manage, and can be easily integrated into the development life cycle. The first 250 assessments are free, and customers pay per assessment after the first 90 days. Amazon describes how Inspector is improving the security of their applications:

“While traditional vulnerability assessment solutions can automate assessments, they require customers to deploy and manage back-end infrastructure. As deployment and operations models become more agile, both developers and central security teams are looking for a way to more easily conduct security assessments and integrate them into the development and deployment lifecycle. Amazon Inspector makes this possible by providing a rich set of APIs that customers can use to automate security assessments of production systems, and also easily integrate security assessments directly into their existing application deployment processes. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can use AWS tags to identify the Amazon EC2 instances they want to assess, specify the associated applications, select from a pre-built list of tests, and set a time duration.”

Amazon’s press release cites organizations who are already benefiting from the new product, including CapLinked, a platform that allows enterprises to securely manage and share documents and business transactions in the cloud. Other organizations mentioned, include The Center for Internet Security, the University of Notre Dame, Coinbase and Betterment, a large independent automated investing service.

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