Cybersecurity Partner Ecosystem Growing

CF: When it comes to cybersecurity, is AWS’ partner ecosystem growing?

AWS’ Ryan Orsi: It is growing, yes. Actually the newest program we have is the Level 1 MSSP Competency Program. That has more than triple our expectations in terms of number of partners that have joined and been a part of the validation process. And it’s about an equal split in terms of your traditional software companies that are putting a managed service around it for 24/7 threat monitoring and response, and service-based companies that utilize other software tools and they package it together. So I’d have to say it’s beating expectations in terms of partners coming into the program, wanting to do joint educational events with us, wanting to bring customers together, working with our service and product teams about what’s coming next so they can put that into their product or their service and address those use cases.

There are over 140 already in the security competency. And it’s a great talent pool. As you know, a cybersecurity professional is kind of a rare person, and then cloud cybersecurity professionals, the field narrows even more. So we look at these partners as a great scaling mechanism for our best practices to get out into that customer community.