About Don Edwards

As the World Wide Tech Leader for AWS Identity, Don Edwards leads the Identity Focus Area, global community of AWS specialists in identity management and access control. His current focus is on distilling the collective knowledge of that community into prescriptive guidance for AWS customers in every stage of their cloud journey. Don is broadly knowledgeable on the technical aspects of security, but he primarily takes the bigger view of how security fits into a company’s overall business strategy. His areas of specialty include risk management, supply chain security, and network architecture. He has held numerous technical certifications, including being a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) since 2012. Don has more than 6 years of direct customer-facing experience at AWS in various roles focused on security and identity in addition to nearly two decades of technical and security experience with companies like Dell and Salesforce.

Who’s doing what, now? Observability and fine-grained authorisation in modern, distributed applications

We can’t predict when data access and audit requirements will change, but we can say with confidence that changes will occur. We’ll discuss a modern authorisation architecture for your applications to speed software delivery and reduce the total cost of ownership. It starts with standardizing in-application permissions on the open-source Cedar policy language and centralising authorisation decisions. This architecture allows you to deploy consistent, fine-grained permissions across all your custom applications that are human-readable and centrally updatable. Your application owners and security teams will get the information and tools they need to understand how applications are being used and how to make adjustments.