Given the number of high-profile hacking incidents during 2016, security is going to be an ever more important topic for as 2017 unfolds, particularly among public cloud vendors. With this in mind, Amazon Web Services has reportedly acquired Harvest.ai, a tiny startup that has developed a system for analyzing user behavior and stopping targeted attacks before they happen, as Techcrunch reports:
Harvest.ai’s flagship, patent-pending AI product is called MACIE Analytics. It uses AI to monitor how a customer’s intellectual property is being accessed in real-time, assessing who is looking at, copying or moving particular documents, and where they are when they’re doing this, in order to identify suspicious patterns of behavior and flag potential data breaches before they’ve taken place. It bills the service as a way to combat the risk of insider attacks.
Amazon declined to comment to Techcrunch on the deal, or even confirm that it occurred; the publication cited a number of unnamed sources in its report. Geekwire separately reported that the acquisition actually occurred in early 2016, citing Fred Wang of Trinity Ventures, which had invested in Harvest.ai.
Harvest.ai's founder and CEO, Alexander Watson, spent seven years at the National Security Agency prior to starting the company. While AWS officials aren't talking about Harvest.ai's technology, it has clear synergies with Amazon Inspector, a tool released in 2015 that AWS customers can use to assess the behavior of applications running on their instances and pinpoint security and compliance issues.
For AWS, security is as much about protecting itself as its customers, given the momentum it has gained with some of the world's largest enterprises. General Electric is moving the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS, as is Capital One, to name just two examples.
The bottom line? Expect AWS as well as rivals such as Microsoft and IBM to make security a top investment priority in 2017.
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