AWS launched Amazon Macie today, a service that leverages machine learning to help customers prevent inadvertent exposure of sensitive data and unauthorized access to data in Amazon S3. The company said Amazon Macie will support additional AWS storage services later this year. 

Inside the company’s S3 (Simple Cloud Storage Service) platform, Amazon Macie will use natural language processing to discover and classify sensitive data, looking at factors such as personally identifiable information, private keys, and credit card information. The Macie service will also continuously monitor data access for unusual activity. Anomalies will trigger alerts to a customer’s security team, Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at AWS, said.

Macie will help users understand other risks associated with data as well, providing automatic alerts when customers may have accidentally made sensitive data externally accessible or stored credentials in an unsecure manner. In addition to analyzing data to understand historical patterns of user authentications, access locations, and times of access, and discovering and classifying sensitive data, Amazon Macie provides a dashboard for tracking user activity and monitoring data security.

The Macie console also allows you to define automated remediation actions such as resetting access control lists or requiring password resets.

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