As the technology world has grown more complicated through an explosion in artificial intelligence use cases, it has also led to challenges for cybersecurity professionals. Generative AI applications must be secured, the infrastructure around AI needs to be protected, and there is a constant worry about new threats driven by AI-powered tools.

For major cloud practitioners such as Amazon Web Services Inc., this reality requires close coordination with its partners to ensure that these factors are properly managed.

“We’re definitely seeing an increase in the velocity of attacks, so obviously security partners have to cater to that, AWS has to cater to that,” said Rohan Karmarkar (pictured), director of APO technology for AWS Partner SA. “These partners are making sure that they build capability to defend against AI-powered attacks and also build capability to make the security engineers and security operations center more productive, more automated. Those are the two things that we’re working with our partners on to build those capabilities using the secure foundation that we have.”

Karmarkar spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier at the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how partners are using AWS tools to mitigate threats and build a more secure environment.

Building cybersecurity on AWS

For partners, a key approach for managing security initiatives in the AI world is to build on the AWS platform. This includes leveraging many of the cloud provider’s intelligence tools, according to Karmarkar.

“PagerDuty, one of our key partners, uses Amazon Q Business, Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker to improve the incident response automation with AI,” Karmarkar said. “There are other partners like Trellix who has a Trellix-wide security assistant, which is built on Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker. Typically, security engineers get overwhelmed with these incidents, so bringing the right context and helping them analyze and getting them more productive is something that security partners are doing.”

Something else that security partners are doing is building agents. AWS is seeing its partners explore innovation in agentic AI to address a wide range of factors, including cost, accuracy and specialized domain management.

“There are a couple of partners like PantherAI and Securonix who have launched various agents that help in security engineering aspects, security operations,” Karmarkar said. “We are seeing a lot of agentic kinds of workflows and applications being built now. They’re starting with simple agents, but we are also seeing trends where agent-to-agent communication and multi-agent kinds of workflows are there.”

Adoption of AI agents and new ways to leverage autonomous technology for improving security have forced many AWS partners and customers to re-evaluate their applications. App modernization has become a key ingredient in building a secure IT environment.

“There’s a lot of conversation around app modernization,” Karmarkar explained. “We definitely are talking about application modernization because application and data modernization is the foundation to have a strong AI. How do we get apps to use the latest technologies, provide interfaces or databases to be vector enabled? It’s an interesting time to be in tech.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE