Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on Wednesday the launch of several tools and services designed to help customers manage their firewalls, use private certificates, and safely store credentials.
Private Certificate Authority
One of the new services is called Private Certificate Authority (CA) and it’s part of the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). The Private CA allows AWS customers to use private certificates without the need for specialized infrastructure.
Developers can now provision private certificates with just a few API calls. At the same time, administrators are provided central management and auditing capabilities, including certificate revocation lists (CRLs) and certificate creation reports. Private CA is based on a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
AWS Secrets Manager
The new AWS Secrets Manager is designed to make it easier for users to store, distribute and rotate their secrets, including credentials, passwords and API keys. The storage and retrieval of secrets can be done via the API or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), while built-in or custom AWS Lambda functions provide the capabilities for rotating credentials.
“Previously, customers needed to provision and maintain additional infrastructure solely for secrets management which could incur costs and introduce unneeded complexity into systems,” explained Randall Hunt, Senior Technical Evangelist at AWS.
AWS Secrets Manager is available in the US East and West, Canada, South America, and most of the EU and Asia Pacific regions. As for pricing, the cost is $0.40 per month per secret, and $0.05 per 10,000 API calls.
AWS Firewall Manager
The new AWS Firewall Manager is designed to simplify administration of AWS WAF web application firewalls across multiple accounts and resources. Administrators can create policies and set up firewall rules and they are automatically applied to all applications, regardless of the region where they are hosted.
“Developers can develop and innovators can innovate, while the security team gains the ability to respond quickly, uniformly, and globally to potential threats and actual attacks,” said Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS.
AWS Shield Advanced customers get the new Firewall Manager at no extra cost, while other users will be charged a monthly fee for each policy in each region.
Amazon EFS data encrypted in transit
Amazon also announced that it has added support for encrypting data in transit for the Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), a file system designed for cloud applications that require shared access to file-based storage. Support for encrypting data at rest has already been available.
The company has made it easier for users to implement encryption in transit with the launch of a new EFS mount helper tool.
Related: Amazon Launches Security and Compliance Analysis Tool for AWS
