AWS Security Profiles: Dan Plastina, VP of Security Services

In the weeks leading up to re:Invent 2019, 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 as the VP of Security Services?

I’ve been at Amazon for just over two years. I lead the External Security Services organization—our team builds AWS services that help customers improve the security of their workloads. Our services include Amazon Macie, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub.

What drew me to Amazon is the culture of ownership and accountability. I wake up every day and get to help AWS customers do things that transform their world—and I get to do that work with a whole bunch of people who feel the same way and take the same level of ownership. It’s very energizing.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

That’s hard! I love most aspects of my job. Forced to pick one, I’d have to say my favorite part is helping customers. Our Shared Responsibility Model says that AWS is accountable for the security of AWS, and customers are responsible for the resources and workloads they manage in AWS. My job allows me to sit on the customer side of the shared responsibility model. Our team builds the services that help customers improve the security of their workloads on AWS. Being able to help in that way is very rewarding.

One of Amazon’s widely-known leadership principles is Customer Obsession. Can you speak to what that looks like in the context of your work?

Being customer obsessed means that you’re in tune with the needs of the customer you’re working with. In the case of external security services, “customer obsessed” requires you to deeply understand what it means for individual customers to protect their assets in AWS, to empathize with those needs, and then to help them figure out how to get from where they are, to where they want to be. Because of this, I spend a lot of time with customers.

Our team participates in many in-person executive customer briefings. We hold a lot of conference calls. I’m flying to the UK on Monday to meet with customers—and I was there three weeks ago. I’ve spent over six weeks this fall traveling to talk with customers.  That much travel time can be hard, but it’s necessary to be in front of customers and listen to what they tell us. I’m fortunate to have a really strong team and so when I’m not traveling, I’m still able to spend a lot of time thinking about customer needs and about what my team should do next.

You’re on an elevator packed with CISOs, and they want you to explain the difference between Security Hub, GuardDuty, Macie, and Inspector before the doors open. What do you say?

First, I would tell them that the services are best understood as a suite of security services, and that AWS Security Hub offers a single pane of glass [Editor: a management tool that integrates information and offers a unified view] into everything else: Use it to understand the severity and sensitivity of findings across the other services you’re using.

Amazon GuardDuty is a continuous security monitoring and threat detection service. You simply choose to have it on or off in your AWS accounts. When it’s enabled, it detects highly suspicious activity and unauthorized access across the entirety of your AWS workloads. While GuardDuty alerts you to potential threats, Amazon Inspector helps you ensure that you address publicly known software vulnerabilities in a timely manner, removing them as a potential entry point for unauthorized users. Amazon Macie offers a particular focus on protecting your sensitive data by giving you a highly scalable and cost effective way to scan AWS for sensitive data and report back what is found and how it is being protected with access controls and encryption.

Then, I’d invite the entire elevator to come to re:Invent, to learn more about the new work my team is doing.

What can you tell us about your team’s re:Invent plans?

We have some exciting things planned for re:Invent this year. I can’t go into specifics yet, but we’re excited about it. A lot of my team will be present, and we’re looking forward to speaking with customers and learning more about what we should work on for next year.

We’ve got a variety of sessions about Security Hub, GuardDuty, and Inspector. If you can only make it to three security-specific sessions, I recommend Threat management in the cloud (SEC206-R), Automating threat detection and response in AWS (SEC301-R), and Use AWS Security Hub to act on your compliance and security posture (SEC342-R).

Is there some connecting thread to all of the various projects that your teams are working on right now?

I see a few threads. One is the concept of security being priority zero. It’s a theme that we live by at AWS, but customers ask us to stretch a little bit further and include their workloads in our security considerations. So workload security is now priority zero too. We’re spending a lot of time working that out and looking for ways to improve our services.

Another thread is that customers are asking us for prescriptive guidance. They’re saying, “Just tell me how I can ensure that my environment is safe. I promise you won’t offend me. Guide me as much as you can, and I’ll disregard anything that isn’t relevant to my environment.”

What’s one currently available security feature that you wish more customers were aware of?

A service, not a feature: AWS Security Hub. It has the ability to bring together security findings from many different AWS, partner, and customer security detection services. Security Hub takes security findings and normalizes them into our Amazon Security Findings Format, ASFF, and then sends them all back out through Amazon CloudWatch events to many partners that are capable of consuming them.

I think customers underestimate the value of having all of these security events normalized into a format that they can use to write a Splunk Phantom runbook, for example, or a Demisto runbook, or a Lambda function, or to send it to Rapid7 or cut a ticket in Jira. There’s a lot of power in what Security Hub does and it’s very cost effective. Many customers have started to use these capabilities, but I know that not everyone knows about it yet.

How do you stay up to date on important cloud security developments across the industry?

I get a lot of insight from customers. Customers have a lot of questions, and I can take these questions as a good indicator of what’s on peoples’ minds. I then do the research needed to get them smart answers, and in the process I learn things myself.

I also subscribe to a number of newsletters, such as Last Week In AWS, that give some interesting information about what’s trending. Reading our AWS blogs also helps because just keeping up with AWS is hard. There’s a lot going on! Listening to the various feeds and channels that we have is very informative.

And then there’s tinkering. I tinker with home automation / Internet of Things projects and with vendor-provided offers such as those provided to me by Splunk, Palo Alto, and CheckPoint of recent. It’s been fun learning partner offerings by building out VLANs, site-to-site tunnels, VPNs, DNS filters, SSL inspection, gateway-level anonymizers, central logging, and intrusion detection systems. You know, the home networking ‘essentials’ we all need.

You’re into riding Superbikes as a hobby. What’s the appeal?

I ride fast bikes on well-known race tracks all around the US several times a year. I love how speed and focus must come together. Going through different corners requires orchestrating all kinds of different motor and mental skills. It flushes the brain and clears your thoughts like nothing else. So, I appreciate the hobby as a way of escaping from normal day-to-day routine. Honestly, there’s nothing like doing 160 mph down a straightaway to teach you how to focus on what is needed, now.

You’re originally from Montreal. What’s one thing a visitor should eat on a trip there?

Let me give you two, eh. If you find yourself in a small rural Quebec restaurant, you must have poutine, the local ‘delicacy’. If you find yourself downtown, near my Alma matter Concordia University, you must enjoy our local student staple, Kojax. That said, it’s honestly hard to make a mistake when you’re eating in Montreal. They have a lot of good food there.

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