AWS Security Profiles: Henrik Johansson, Principal, Office of the CISO

In the weeks leading up to re:Invent, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people at AWS who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.

How long have you been at AWS, and what do you do in your current role?

As a Principal for the Office of the CISO, I not only get to spend time directly with our customers and their executives and operational teams, I also get to work with our own service teams and other parts of our organization. Additionally, a big part of this role involves spending time with the industry as a whole, in both small and large settings, and trying to raise the bar of the overall industry together with a number of other teams within AWS.

How do you explain your job to non-tech friends?

Whether or not someone understands what the cloud is, I try to focus on the core part of the role: I help people and organizations understand AWS Security and what it means to operate securely on the cloud. And I focus on helping the industry achieve these same goals.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

Helping customers and their executive leadership to understand the benefits of cloud security and how they can improve the overall security posture by using cloud features. Getting to show them how we can help drive road maps and new features and functions that they can use to secure their workloads (based on their valuable feedback) is very rewarding.

Tell us about the open source communities you support. Why they are important to AWS?

The open source community is important to me for a couple of reasons. First, it helps enable and inspire innovation by inviting the community at large to expand on the various use cases our services provide. I also really appreciate how customers enable other customers by not only sharing their own innovations but also inviting others to contribute and further improve their solutions. I have a couple of open source repositories that I maintain, where I put various security automation tools that I’ve built to show various innovative ways that customers can use our services to strengthen their security posture. Even if you don’t use open source in your company, you can still look at the vast number of projects out there, both from customers and from AWS, and learn from them.

What does cloud security mean to you, personally?

For me, it represents the possibility of creating efficient, secure solutions. I’ve been working in various security roles for almost twenty-five years, and the ability we have to protect data and our infrastructure has never been stronger. We have an incredible opportunity to solve challenges that would have been insurmountable before, and this leads to one thing: trust. It allows us to earn trust from customers, trust from users, and trust from the industry. It also enables our customers to earn trust from their users.

In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge facing cloud security right now?

The opportunities far outweigh the challenges, honestly. The different methods that customers and users have to gain visibility into what they’re actually running is mind-blowing. That visibility is a combination of knowing what you have, knowing what you run, and knowing all the ins and outs of it. I still hear people talking about that server in the corner under someone’s desk that no one else knows about. That simply doesn’t exist in the cloud, where everything is an API call away. If anything, the challenge lies in finding people who want to continue driving the innovation and solving the hard cases with all the technology that’s at our fingertips.

Five years from now, what changes do you think we’ll see across the security/compliance landscape?

One shift we’re already seeing is that compliance is becoming a natural part of the security and innovation conversation. Previously, “compliance” meant that maybe you had a specific workload that needed to be PCI-compliant, or you were under HIPAA requirements. Nowadays, compliance is a more natural part of what we do. Privacy is everywhere. It has to be everywhere, based on requirements like GDPR, but we’re seeing that a lot of these “have to be” requirements turning into “want to be” requirements — we’re not distinguishing between the users that are required to be protected and the “regular” users. More and more, we’re seeing that privacy is always going to have a seat at the table, which is something we’ve always wanted.

At re:Invent 2018, you’re presenting two sessions together with Andrew Krug. How did you choose your topics?

They’re a combination of what I’m passionate about and what I see our customers need. This is the third year I’ve presented my Five New Security Automations Using AWS Security Services & Open Source session. Previously, I’ve also built boot camps and talks around secure automation, DevSecOps, and container security. But we have a big need for open source security talks that demonstrate how people can actually use open source to integrate with our services — not just as a standalone piece, but actually using open source as inspiration for what they can build on their own. That’s not to say that AWS services aren’t extremely important. They’re the driving force here. But the open source piece allows people to adapt solutions to their specific needs, further driving the use cases together with the various AWS security services.

What are you hoping that your audience will take away from your sessions?

I want my audience to walk away feeling that they learned something new, and that they can build something that they didn’t know how to before. They don’t have to take and use the specific open source tools we put out there, but I want them to see our examples as a way to learn how our services work. It doesn’t matter if you just download a sample script or if you run a full project, or a full framework, but it’s important to learn what’s possible with services beyond what you see in the console or in the documentation.

Any tips for first-time conference attendees?

Plan ahead, but be open to ad-hoc changes. And most importantly, wear sneakers or comfortable walking shoes. Your feet will appreciate it.

If you had to pick any other job, what would you want to do with your life?

If I picked another role at Amazon, it would definitely be a position around innovation, thinking big, and building stuff. Even if it was a job somewhere else, I’d still want it to involve building, whether woodshop projects or a robot. Innovation and building are my passions.

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