My main use case for Antivirus for Amazon S3 is that my customers use S3 for a variety of use cases where data is constantly uploaded and downloaded from S3, making it extremely important to protect my S3 buckets globally from any kind of virus that might corrupt files, that might create other security concerns and introduce bugs into my AWS ecosystem.

A quick specific example of how I have used Antivirus for Amazon S3 in one of those scenarios is when we expose S3 endpoints for our external partners to upload files, and we have applied antivirus there to do a check on the files being uploaded prior to those being uploaded into S3, which gives us confidence that the files being uploaded are not corrupt or a security threat for us.

Antivirus for Amazon S3 has positively impacted my organization by giving us the confidence that we can really expose our S3 buckets to the external world without having to worry about security, and from a developer standpoint, we know that at any point in time globally if S3 buckets are created, we have templates that will automatically enforce the antivirus policies there, improving our overall security posture rather than compromising it because we do have a large footprint on S3.

The best features Antivirus for Amazon S3 offers include that it is really a built-in feature which is really great, as you don't have to do anything extra, there's no operational complexity or cost overhead associated with it, and because it's a managed solution, it's easy for us to configure policies as S3 buckets are created globally and make sure they have the necessary virus protection as needed.

The simplicity and ease of policy configuration have helped my team day-to-day because, as it is part of the AWS ecosystem, I don't need to really hire a separate skill set to configure this service, and moreover, if I use the console, all the features are available to me at a click, and I can also programmatically control it, making configuring the antivirus part of setting S3 objects rather than setting up a separate service altogether on top of S3.

I think Antivirus for Amazon S3 could be improved by slightly further automating the process; beyond just the ability to send notifications, if an email could be crafted or if communication through any channel could be established with the person or team who uploaded the file, that level of automation could be avoided on our end, allowing us to configure an entire loop from detecting a malicious upload to contacting the uploader and taking corrective action, which I think would be really cool.

I have not had a need to contact customer support many times, but during the weekdays, they have been fairly available to us, and in the initial days during the 30-day trial period, we received email support and could contact their expert when required while setting it up, so overall, I'm pleased with the basic support model provided.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it really is appealing, priced at an optimal point of view, where it feels practically free.

I have seen a return on investment with Antivirus for Amazon S3; while it is a little too early to see the overall impact, detecting 200 plus malware in a month is a good sign of our improved security posture.

Since using Antivirus for Amazon S3, we have been able to detect malicious files, and we have configured AWS EventBridge to notify us whenever such an incident occurs, leading to an average of 200 to 300 notifications of malware per month globally, which gives us confidence that the antivirus is working, and the entire notification service in AWS allows us to dig a little bit deeper into audit trails and CloudWatch to figure out where incidents occurred and work with those individuals or teams to ensure that accidental attempts don't happen again or address any malicious activity with our partners.

My advice to others looking into using Antivirus for Amazon S3 is that it is absolutely essential; there are options like MetaDefender, Bucket AV, and Amazon GuardDuty to consider, but it's a no-brainer to have antivirus on it when you're thinking about exposing S3 endpoints externally.

I chose that rating because I would have given a 10 if it had the end-to-end feature of automation I spoke about, where from the point of detection all the way to communicating with the person who uploaded the file, that entire loop is automated.

I found this interview logical and appreciated providing feedback in this format for the first time. I assigned a review rating of 8 to Antivirus for Amazon S3.