AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Marriott’s CISO Arno Van Der Walt manages cybersecurity through a “human-centered, data-driven, technology-enabled” approach aimed at making security frictionless. Critical partnerships with AWS, Deloitte, and Palo Alto Networks leverage AI/ML to share threat data and empower “impossible” autonomous security. Together, their tri-party services provide an end-to-end platform unifying business and security data to detect threats and enable quick response.

Customers implementing sophisticated solutions based on AWS technologies often seek out qualified partners who bring their industry expertise to the table and help accelerate a return on investment (ROI) that achieves business outcomes faster. Partner-Led Support offers AWS Partners the opportunity to expand their sources of recurring revenue by complementing and supplementing AWS capabilities in delivering technical support to customers.

In today’s fast-paced world, small and medium businesses (SMBs) are leveraging the power of the cloud to drive innovation, reach new customers, develop new revenue streams, and increase productivity. To support this journey, the AWS Small and Medium Business Competency helps customers find partner solutions that support the diverse and evolving needs of their business. SMB Competency Partners offer a wide range of solutions, including migration and modernization, security, data storage, AI/ML, and more.

To grow with AWS, partners can pursue Competency designations which validate an organization’s expertise through rigorous assessment by AWS experts. By meeting requirements around projects, certifications, and capabilities, partners can demonstrate their proficiency and earn an AWS specialization badge in specific industries, use cases, or workloads. Attaining an AWS Competency distinguishes partners, but the preparation process also transforms practices.

As we continue to transform the AWS Partner experience, we’re excited to share updates to the Validation Checklists (VCL) for AWS Specialization Programs (AWS Competency, Managed Service Provider, Service Delivery, and Service Ready). Effective January 1, 2024, the updates drive efficiencies during onboarding, allowing partners to achieve an AWS Specialization faster and making it easier to utilize benefits.

Sentieon genomics analysis tools and MemVerge’s Memory Machine Cloud (MMCloud) reduce cost and improve performance for next-generation sequencing pipelines on AWS. MMCloud monitors job resource usage and seamlessly migrates running processes between optimally sized Amazon EC2 instances. Tests with a Sentieon whole genome sequencing pipeline showed a 40% decrease in runtime and 34% cost reduction versus running on a single overprovisioned instance.

Sustainability is a strategic priority for organizations in the global transition to net-zero emissions. Many AWS Partners have chosen to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to achieve their decarbonization goals. Learn how to incorporate sustainability into your organization with a CCoE and how AWS services can help. With these efforts in place, your business can consider joining the 460 signatories who have signed The Climate Pledge and are working towards carbon neutrality by 2040.

Social media is an integral part of everyday life as billions use it to connect, share, and find entertainment. Hootsuite provides businesses with a secure, scalable platform to manage social media across channels, analyze performance, and deliver customer care. By leveraging AWS services, Hootsuite offers robust tools to help brands economically manage their digital footprint, better understand their audience, and optimize their social media investments.

Data observability enables monitoring, understanding, and troubleshooting data pipelines to ensure smooth and efficient workflows. By tracking metrics like lineage, volume, and schema, data engineers can quickly identify issues, optimize performance, and make informed decisions. TCS outlines an approach using AWS services for event ingestion, aggregation, and visualization to address observability challenges.

ADP provides cloud-based human capital management solutions to over 1 million clients in 140 countries. Using an active-active multi-region architecture on AWS, ADP built a highly available and resilient Voice of Employee application to collect employee feedback throughout the workforce lifecycle. The multi-region deployment meets availability goals and leverages AWS services to enable rapid disaster recovery.

Symmetry Systems DataGuard is a data security posture management solution to enhance protection of sensitive data in AWS environments. It seamlessly integrates with AWS services to discover where sensitive data resides, map permissions, and identify risks—all without extracting data. Overall, the combination of AWS security services and Symmetry Systems DataGuard enables organizations to securely unlock the full potential of the cloud.

The evolution of embedded and invisible banking has led to complex integrations between financial organizations and third-party platforms. To simplify identity management across business partners, organizations are investigating identity-as-a-service solutions using blockchain. Capgemini can help implement embedded and invisible banking by leveraging Amazon Managed Blockchain to manage decentralized identities. This provides a single immutable identity for users that scales across sub-units and partners.

Companies often struggle to understand customer sentiment in call center data, posing barriers to responding to emotions in real-time. SuccessKPI uses natural language understanding and machine learning on a large dataset to enable sentiment prediction. This helps avoid bias of human reviewers and attain objective results when analyzing customer feedback. SuccessKPI offers capabilities like sentiment by channel, time, quarter, and entity to transform customer experiences.

As systems generate increasing data, making sense of it is critical. Application logs are unique and not standardized. Leidos addresses logging issues using the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) and Amazon Security Lake via the Leidos OCSF Integration Suite (LOIS), which bridges applications to generate OCSF-compliant messages and ingest them into Amazon Security Lake for analysis and visualization.