AWS and MongoDB: Partners in Reliable, Resilient Cloud Environments

Security is increasingly critical for application development. While the volume of applications developed, distributed, used, and patched over networks is rapidly expanding, so, too, are cyberattacks and data breaches, many of which happen at the web application layer.

As more organizations move to the cloud, it’s imperative for customers to know who’s responsible for what when it comes to security. Understanding these roles and responsibilities is crucial for ensuring cloud workloads remain secure and available. MongoDB and AWS are working together to simplify and strengthen data security for our customers so they can focus on developing great applications and user experiences.

For more information on shared responsibility, read the first blog in this series.

Shared responsibility in the cloud

Back when most IT environments lived on premises, the responsibility of securing the systems and networked devices fell squarely on the owner of the assets — usually the business owner or a managed service provider. Today, with the prevalence of cloud applications, hybrid environments, and pay-as-you-go services, it is often not clear who's responsible for what when it comes to securing those environments, services, and the data they contain.

For this reason, the shared responsibility model of cloud security has emerged. Under the shared responsibility model, some security responsibilities fall on the business, some on public cloud providers, and some on the vendors of the cloud services being used.

When you deploy a MongoDB Atlas database on AWS, the database is created on infrastructure operated, managed, and controlled by AWS, from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the AWS data centers.

MongoDB is responsible for the security and availability of the services we offer — and for everything within the scope of our responsibilities as a SaaS vendor. Customers are responsible for the security of everything above the application layer — accounts, identities, devices, and data — plus the management of the guest operating system, including updates and security patches; associated application software; and the configuration of the AWS-provided security group firewall. (See Figure 1.)

Strategic partners in data solutions

MongoDB Chief Information Security Officer Lena Smart delivered a keynote at AWS re:Inforce, an event where security experts offered tips and best practices for securing workloads in the cloud, and was also interviewed by theCUBE.

Smart noted how MongoDB and AWS are working together to enable our joint customers to focus more on business objectives while having the confidence in the cloud services and infrastructure they get from us. "You want to worry less about security so that you can focus on application development, performance, availability, business continuity, data management, and access," Smart said. "As the CISO of MongoDB, these concerns are also my top concerns as we work to better serve our global customer base. And we are very appreciative of the opportunity to do this in lockstep with AWS."

Jenny Brinkley, Director, AWS Security, agrees that customers stand to benefit through the shared responsibility model. "The shared responsibility model is a huge reason why more customers are deploying in the cloud," Brinkley said. "AWS, combined with marketplace services like MongoDB Atlas, help relieve the customer's operational burden so they can focus on driving their businesses forward."

Smart's appearance at the event is just one example of how MongoDB and AWS are working together to deliver scalable data intelligence solutions for enterprise data in the cloud, reduce risk for cloud-native tools, and enable our joint customers to achieve compliance and protect their sensitive data. Thanks to our strategic partnership, organizations around the globe and across a wide range of industries — from banking and airlines to insurance and e-commerce — are better able to discover, manage, protect, and get more value from their regulated, sensitive, and personal data across their data landscape.

MongoDB Atlas is trusted by organizations with highly sensitive workloads because it is secure by default. We're constantly innovating with new, breakthrough technologies, like our industry-first queryable encryption, which allows customers to run rich, expressive queries on fully randomized encrypted data, improving both the development process and the user experience.