AWS CloudTrail Goes Live In Europe
Amazon Web Services is investing heavily in its European operations. Just last week, AWS began offering Desktops as a Service in the European region of their Cloud. This week, Amazon has released CloudTrail for EU residents. What is CloudTrail? This monitoring tool logs API calls and delivers the data to the cloud administrator. This data is useful to organizations because it can provide more than just an audit trail. CloudTrail can provide insights on API security and the tracking of changes in resources in your specific cloud.
What are the key advantages of CloudTrail in the EU? When CloudTrail is setup, it can be configured to run on locale services. If you are currently in the EU, the data is delivered to the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and the data never leaves the EU’s Cloud. This is an added layer of protection for those who are weary about moving their data though the American regions of AWS. Given that the data is stored on Amazon S3, you can set up access privileges for those who need to later inspect this data.
CloudTrail allows administrators to monitor a variety of Amazon services. This includes the Elastic Compute Cloud, Block Store and MapReduce. CloudTrail users will also have the ability to gain analytics from Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation management services. All of this data will be moved using encrypted means. As a default setting, CloudTrail operates using S3 SSE. S3 SSE stands for Simple Storage Service using Service Side Encryption.
Amazon has a nice FAQ write up better explaining the services to those who are interested. On the Amazon FAQ page, Amazon notes that those who would like to utilize this service can do so in 2 clicks. Amazon says that you must use the AWS Management Console to turn on this service. Since this has recently been enabled for European Cloud users, you may want to recheck your AWS Management Console to ensure that this feature has been enabled for your use. Those located in America should already have this feature available.
