This week marked my 2nd time attending AWS re:Invent. The last time was in 2017. Below is an update on what I learned with a 2 minute fast paced (5x) tour that I captured with my GoPro on my way to booth duty. My introverted head is still spinning, and I’m crashing back down to earth, but here goes nothing. 🤓
2 Minute Video Tour of the AWS re:Invent Expo
Wake Up and Shake Up
For Cyber PMMs, re:Invent is a fresh wake up call to the realities of developers, IT/infrastructure experts, and builders. The “shake up” comes from leaving my Cyber PMM comfort zone and learning a barrage of new terms and products. Some terms are not new but just growing in usage — e.g. I saw “AI” ~50 times this week in vendor messaging – it was the most heavily used term across the Expo by my observation. Speaking of observing…
Diving into Observability
My journey this week was also a crash course in Observability. Initially, staffing the IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) demo pod was daunting. Thankfully, several Splunk peers schooled me and equipped me to deliver around 15 “reduce alert noise” ITSI demos.
Back to Security
Returning to my comfort zone, I presented 7 theater talks on 1) Splunk Security, 2) Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) + Amazon Security Lake, and 3) Splunk Enterprise Security (SIEM). These topics all intersected in the area of data normalization and security analytics, fitting in the overall theme of SOC Modernization through risk-based threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR).
Key Takeaway
Security and Observability are becoming more like Yin & Yang than I had realized and re:Invent is the best venue I’ve attended to have this integrated discussion. The consistent theme I found across Security and Observability was the need for SecOps & ITOps to gain visibility into risk through the analysis of massive amounts of alerts/data; and then the capacity to enable fast and (when possible) automated actions to resolve incidents. This enables organizations to be more resilient by safeguarding assets/data, and keeping apps and services up and running.
Until we meet again, re:Invent. I hope it doesn’t take 6 years until I get go back next time!
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