Boston AWS Meetup - February 2014

Boston Amazon AWS Meetup.

Guest Moderator: Dan Belcher, Co-founder, Stackdriver

Meetup Presentation: Agile robot identity for cloud and SOA. Given by Conjur, Inc.

Presentation abstract:

Consolidated end-user identity management and coarse-grained web application access control have improved security and improved enterprise agility. Managing access control for a multiplicity of backend services and data assets is the next challenge for IT and software development teams. Centralized management, tracking, and analysis of infrastructure identity and access controls is the next phase of evolution for security and compliance.

A unified approach to infrastructure access control across the application tier improves organizational agility and transparency, improves development team productivity and sets up a well-defined collaboration between developers and devops. This presentation will highlight the following best practices, in the context of a recently developed real-world cloud-based data processing platform:

• Management of “robot” and user identity for purposes of infrastructure management with discussion of Amazon IAM strengths and weaknesses

• Management and distribution of keys, credentials, and other secrets

• Dynamic and robust authorization of service-to-service and service-to-data requests

• Access control as a functionality to satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements

• The importance of an audit trail to optimize operational architecture and detect suspicious behavior

Presenters:

Kevin Gilpin:
Kevin Gilpin is Chief Technical Officer and Co-Founder of Conjur. He has a long background in enterprise software, working in many different industries including pharmaceuticals, search technology, logistics, healthcare, financial services, and automotive. Kevin is a lifelong builder, starting with countless boyhood afternoons building airplanes in his basement, then studying aerospace engineering at MIT, and now building virtually in software.

Kevin is an experienced enterprise software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded Conjur Inc ( https://angel.co/conjur ) in 2011. Conjur’s mission is to accelerate the development of enterprise cloud and SOA applications by providing a web service for programmatic access control, auditing, and permissions management. Prior to Conjur, Kevin was a co-founder of Praxeon Inc, an innovator in text mining and search for medical and scientific content. He is also an alumnus of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, i2 Technologies, and Austin-based Trilogy. The technology he developed for the Trilogy automotive team delivered pioneering interactivity on the web and has ultimately been adopted industry-wide. His education includes a BS in aero/astro engineering from MIT ‘94 and MS ‘95. Kevin is a father of 4, and enjoys beer-league ice hockey and towing his Airstream around the northeast.

Jason Calvert:
Jason is the Associate Director of Software Engineering at Novartis, where prior to that, he was the Senior Global Systems Architect. He has previously worked at The MathWorks and Abbott Bioresearch. He is well versed in Linux, Java, and cloud computing. Jason is a '00 graduate of Oregon State University with degrees in mathematics and computer science.

Thank you. All the best!

• Mark Annati