What is our primary use case?
We are trying to use Amazon Macie for pattern matching, which is one of the things that we are doing, along with sensitive data storage and protection of sensitive data.
We use Amazon Macie in the manufacturing industry.
How has it helped my organization?
The detailed reports on data privacy risk provided by Amazon Macie are really good and have contributed positively to our data governance strategies.
The contribution of Amazon Macie to our organization's data governance plan is significant because cybersecurity is one of the key areas within an organization at this point in time. It has helped us save a lot of time, as instead of generating those reports manually, we leverage Amazon Macie for that. They can generate automated reports that are approximately 80-90% complete, and we only have to add about 5-10% on top of it before sharing it back. It was a good time-saver and resulted in more accurate reports.
Amazon Macie helped our organization respond to potential threats.
What is most valuable?
The best features of Amazon Macie include sensitive data identification, particularly for PII, which is pre-built and helpful because we don't have to define it ourselves. Those features are already embedded, which was beneficial. Additionally, some insights and alerts were coming up that were also pre-configured. It's not difficult to do that, but it's more of a build versus buy decision. These features were of great help to us.
My experience with Amazon Macie's ability to provide alerts for suspicious activity in real-time has been good. We utilized the alerts for threat detection.
Customizable features of Amazon Macie have helped significantly in maintaining fine-grained control over access and usage of sensitive information, offering a good combination of personalized options and out-of-the-box solutions.
What needs improvement?
From my perspective, Amazon Macie can be improved by extending PII to make it more collaborative between the customer and the out-of-box features. Not only should it focus on PII information, but detecting anomalies or threats would also be beneficial. There may be some AWS products that we can sync up with Amazon Macie, and I think that if some of these features are added, it could be a one-stop shop for us.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have worked with Amazon Macie for a year or two, but we are trying to figure out how we can use it better. We could say we have been using it for a year.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
The initial setup of Amazon Macie was pretty straightforward; fine-tuning took some time, but everything else was good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
My experience with the pricing or licensing of Amazon Macie is that it was good enough to get started with, but as we keep adding, it increases the cost as well. Most organizations start thinking whether they should keep it in-house or continue using an out-of-the-box solution.
It's becoming pricey.
How are customer service and support?
I have had experience with Amazon Macie's support.
Amazon Macie's support is pretty good; I would rate it around eight or nine out of ten.
They are knowledgeable and strive to take issues to completion and closure, which is one of the key things I look for. There might be a bit of work needed on the turnaround time, which might be due to bandwidth issues. Overall, it was good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Amazon Macie was pretty straightforward; fine-tuning took some time, but everything else was good.
What about the implementation team?
Two people were part of the deployment of Amazon Macie.
They were DevOps personnel and data engineering, specifically in Data ML Engineering.
What other advice do I have?
I haven't used the automated data discovery feature of Amazon Macie.
We wanted to assess the multi-account management feature through AWS Organizations, but unfortunately, we couldn't fully implement it. We just enabled it in a few accounts, but we really wanted to extend it to the organization level to be spent across multiple accounts; however, we never completed that part.
PII information is basically standard to an extent with Amazon Macie, but there are a few things which are very specific to our industry and organization, and that's where we have to do some level of configuration to include them as part of the PII detections.
On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon Macie a nine.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
