What Is Amazonaws Com Used For

Did you know that ignorance is elation? When I was in school, I didn't think about cybersecurity at all, and had a devil-may-care approach to cyberspace browsing. Only since my outset solar day at Plixer a few years ago, I've go much more aware of keeping my personal devices and information safe. As a result, I want to know every procedure that's running on my estimator and every host it'due south connecting to.

Just and so some days a traffic report will look like this:

Why is everyone connecting to amazonaws.com? And what is Amazon AWS anyway? It seems that many people are unfamiliar with this ubiquitous domain.

Connecting to amazonaws.com isn't bad—necessarily

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. Over one million customers effectually the globe use AWS as a content commitment network (CDN). This ways that when you lot access certain organizations' content online, you're accessing it from Amazon'due south data centers rather than a information center owned by that organization. It's benign for everyone; the organization doesn't have to spend resources on hosting content themselves, and yous get to relish faster download speed. Part of the reason for the latter is that AWS has data centers distributed globally, then you can download from the 1 physically nearest to yous.

Take for example ane of AWS's prominent customers, Netflix. When I think their introduction of streaming in 2007, I remember waiting for a lot of buffering. Do yous hate when your motion picture is continually interrupted as much as I exercise? Information technology was 1 of the worst things near an otherwise bang-up service.

Just in 2009, Netflix started to switch over to AWS. It makes perfect sense—Netflix has customers all over the world. By using a CDN, they don't have to accept on the massive cost of building global information centers, and their customers take a good experience no matter where they live. Now I seldom have to await for buffering.

What does this hateful for network traffic analysis?

Although the users, organizations, and providers are all happy about this solution, at that place'south however one grouping for whom CDNs can be a thorn in the side: IT professionals. It'due south not helpful to see users connecting to amazonaws.com. They could be accessing all kinds of inappropriate content.

Say you're in charge of making sure nobody violates company policy. Well, most offices ban Netflix, only your report might bear witness everyone connecting to amazonaws.com, every bit in the to a higher place epitome. For all you know, every unmarried one of those instances could be connections to Netflix. But yous can't know considering they're hidden behind a CDN domain.

Luckily, our network traffic analyzer, Scrutinizer, can ingest metadata that reveals the URLs. With this visibility, IT professionals can determine whether anyone was goofing effectually or even connecting to a malicious domain:

If you would like to acquire more most CDNs and gaining visibility into those connections, cheque out our related weblog on Akamai traffic.

Alienor

Alienor is a technical writer at Plixer. She peculiarly enjoys writing about the latest infosec news and creating guides and tips that readers can utilise to go on their information safe. When she's non writing, Alienor spends her fourth dimension cooking Japanese cuisine, watching movies, and playing Monster Hunter.