News

Report Shows Security Tools Most Popular on AWS

• By David Ramel
• 05/29/2015

Being an original premier partner of Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) and a specialist in helping enterprises move to the cloud, 2ndWatch has a unique perspective on AWS usage trends, which it shared in a report that revealed security tools were the most popular third-party purchase.

The Seattle company used data collected from the 75,000-plus AWS instances it manages to compile a usage report for the first quarter of the year, detailing the most popular AWS products, instance types, regions and so on.

"Cloud-based security products once again topped the list of most purchased third-party products for AWS deployments," company exec Jeff Aden said in a blog post earlier this month. "The top four products were: Alert Logic Log Manager for AWS, Alert Logic Threat Manager for AWS, AlienVault Unified Security Management for AWS and Barracuda Web Application Firewall. This trend makes sense given that more companies in highly regulated industries are moving data and applications to AWS."

Turning to usage stats, 2nd Watch concluded that enterprises are transferring more Big Data and other analytics applications to the Amazon cloud, judging from an increase in medium-size EC2 instances from the fourth quarter of last year.

Other stats highlighted by 2nd Watch included:

• Windows-based instances are growing (from 34 percent in Q4 to 76 percent) at the expense of Linux instances, which decreased from 66 percent to 24 percent.
• Almost everyone (97 percent) uses S3 storage, with other popular products being EC2 (82 percent), SNS messaging (70 percent), SQS message queuing (61.4 percent) and relational database service (RDS), at 46.9 percent.
• Among databases, the RDS MySQL service -- with the bring-your-own-license (BYOL) option-- led the pack with 29 percent usage, followed by EC2 SQL Server Standard (16 percent), EC2 SQL Server Web (4 percent), RDS Oracle SE (4 percent) and RDS PostreSQL (3 percent).
• The most popular EC2 types were small and medium, both at 29 percent, followed by large (17 percent) and extra large (10 percent).

"It will be interesting to see how this data changes in future quarters," 2nd Watch said. "For example, we will be watching to see what effect, if any, Amazon's continued investment in Redshift and EC2 Container Service availability have on the way customers use AWS. In the meantime, the Q1 Scorecard data backs up what we're hearing from customers: Big companies are moving more business-critical data and applications to the public cloud. And that's a trend we don't see changing anytime soon."

A PDF infographic of the report can be found here.