Strangeways, Here We Come: A Journey from On-Prem to Cloud First with AWS

Presented at BSidesSF 2019, March 3, 2019, 4:50 p.m. (30 minutes).

The underlying desire with any technology is to push beyond its limits. In the 80s, we had the PC turbo button. In the 00s, everyone got all saas-y with software as a service. In the 2010s, we have the cloud (or as some of us know it, just someone else's computer). Jokes aside, leveraging the cloud allows teams to deliver content more rapidly compared to a local/on-prem solution. This sounds great until you remember nothing in life is free—cloud security is no exception. While this talk is technical, we will begin by discussing the benefits motivating a small startup's decision to transition from on-prem to the cloud along with the inherent risk. A wide range of factors were considered: hiring, platform selection, technology stack, user management. We will talk about Amazon Web Services (AWS), the moving parts of our cloud, and what was required to get a minimum viable product off the ground. We will share our own ProTips for going cloud first; by the end, hopefully you’ll walk away with a few cheat codes of your own, whether it’s getting a peek at going cloud first or a verification of your own cloud security best practices.

Presenters:

  • Victor Clark - Insight Engines
    Victor Clark is the Cloud Security Engineer at Insight Engines, a natural language processing (NLP) startup located in San Francisco, CA, USA. His breadth of experience ranges from several other startups to Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies. As digital privacy and digital rights advocate, Victor immensely enjoys bringing passion to his profession. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time in foggy weather with his wife and young child, along with playing guitar and bass poorly in bands with friends who also love mid-90s skate punk.

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