Announcing the Security Competency for APN Consulting Partners

Recognizing APN Consulting Partners who provide deep technical and consulting expertise helping enterprises adopt, develop, and deploy complex security projects.

Security is the top priority at AWS.

Under the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS provides a global secure infrastructure and foundation compute, storage, networking and database services, as well as higher level services. While AWS manages security of the cloud, security in the cloud is the responsibility of the customer. Customers retain control of what security they choose to implement to protect their own content, platform, applications, systems and networks, no differently than they would for applications in an on-site data center.

For customers and APN Partners, it’s important to understand this distinction and learn where your responsibilities lie. But you certainly don’t need to go this alone. There are a number of APN Technology and Consulting Partners who build and offer value-added security solutions and services to help you implement the security measures you need to meet your unique requirements, all while taking advantage of the data center and network architecture built by AWS to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Security Competency for Consulting Partners to help you identify and connect with APN Consulting Partners who’ve demonstrated technical and consulting expertise helping enterprises adopt, develop, and deploy complex security projects.

The Security Competency for Consulting Partners

Our customers often ask us to help them identify consultants who have expertise in building, deploying, and managing workloads that meet stringent security requirements. Furthermore, customers are looking at ways to take advantage of the automation and agility the cloud affords to efficiently and effectively meet and exceed their security needs. APN Consulting Partners can provide value-added support and guidance to help augment the resources customers may have to address the unique security requirements of their applications and workloads on AWS. Security Competency Consulting Partners possess deep technical and consulting expertise helping enterprises adopt, develop, and deploy complex security projects. In order to achieve the Competency, APN Partners must provide supporting documentation such as architectural designs for review by AWS and its 3rd party auditor.

Security Competency Consulting Partners possess technical and consulting expertise in one or more of the following areas:

Security Operations and Automation

• Help customers move to an “Infrastructure as Code” process for managing their AWS Footprint and Security Controls by using immutable building constructs such as CI/CD build pipelines and associated tools such as Git, Jenkins, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy
• Build security by default into continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD), and DevOps pipelines
• Help implement DevSecOps or SecDevOps and automate security changes (e.g., patch management, AMI pipelines) at scale
• Implementing Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) programs, analysis and automated response to security events

Security Engineering

• AWS infrastructure security deployments (firewalls, IDS, proxies, etc.)
• VPC design including multi-VPC design patterns and multi-region redundancy
• Design infrastructure for secrets management, DDoS Resiliency, centralized logging and authentication, etc.
• Build custom applications to serve security needs
• Guide and implement security strategies across multiple AWS accounts

Governance, Risk, and Compliance

• Privileged user and role management, logging, and alerting
• Designing organizational-wide security playbooks and standard operating procedures
• Facilitating work to assure that workloads maintain compliance to specific regimes and assurance programs (e.g., PCI, HIPAA, SOX, etc.) and maintain appropriate certification for APN Partner personnel, where required

Congratulations to our launch partners!

The following Advanced and Premier tier APN Consulting Partners are launch Security Competency Partners:

• 8K Miles
• Accenture
• Cloudreach
• Cloud Technology Partners
• Deloitte
• GuidePoint Security
• Logicworks
• Nomura Research Institute
• REAN Cloud LLC
• stackArmor

Want to become a Security Competency Partner?

Are you looking for a way to differentiate your firm to customers based on your expertise helping customers build and manage secure environments on AWS? Becoming a Security Competency Partner through the APN can increase your visibility to your target customers – you gain public designation as a Security Competency Partner throughout the AWS website and AWS Partner Solutions Finder as well as use of a Competency Badge in marketing collateral. You also gain a number of additional benefits such as eligibility for targeted demand generation campaigns with AWS, preferred access to AWS private betas, and preferred access to AWS roadmap briefings from AWS services teams.

Learn more about the requirements for the Security Competency here.

Want to learn more about AWS Cloud security? Click here.