After wrapping up their annual cloud security conference “re:Inforce 2025” on June 18, cloud behemoth Amazon Web Services (AWS) zeroed in on the emerging security concerns of organizations in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region.
On July 8, the cloud services provider held a virtual media briefing to spotlight the emerging security priorities it is witnessing among APJ companies, and how their latest security innovations — unveiled during this year’s re:Inforce — address these growing concerns.
APJ companies intensifying focus on cybersecurity comes as AI deployments transition from limited test environments to wider operations, which is forcing companies to consider additional security and data privacy measures, including stricter access controls and more efficient monitoring.
A 2024 Deloitte report even found that 75% of their organizational respondents plan to increase their security investments because of Gen AI programs.
“Pretty much every company is now entering the phase where they need to leverage AI and drive business value from this technology. So our customers are looking to us to help support their growth and do it safely,” said Bryce Boland, AWS head of Security Solution Architecture for APJ, during the briefing.
Boland revealed APJ customers’ three key priorities are improving resilience, keeping management complexity down while upgrading security, and securing their AI workloads.
AWS Security Hub
First, Boland dove into customers quest for resilience. He stressed that AWS’ clients are searching for ways to boost uptime because every minute of downtime can cost organizations millions of dollars in lost revenue. More importantly, he claimed AWS is ready to meet their need for resilience.
Boland boasted that the AWS cloud infrastructure experiences 2.7 times less downtime in the APJ compared to the region’s other cloud providers. He credited it to AWS’ multi-layered protections that strengthen the company’s cloud infrastructure and aid clients’ in securing their own workloads.
These multi-layered protections are continuously updated and the AWS Security Hub is the latest addition to these defenses. Launched during re:Inforce, this new centralized dashboard empowers customers to identify, monitor, and remediate critical cybersecurity issues from a single view as they scale their cloud environments and AI deployments.
Currently only available in Preview, this tool helps customers streamline cloud security operations and incident response so they can swiftly resolve issues and minimize downtime.
Simplifying security
Boland next tackled customers need for upgraded security with reduced complexity. AWS reported that APJ customers are being overwhelmed by the increasingly complicated task of securing their applications, particularly as manual processes and fragmented tools impede full visibility of network security issues and threats across technology stacks.
Regarding network security, customers reported that manual approaches to ensure network visibility were time-consuming and did not scale effectively. On top of this problem, fragmented network security tools hindered the prioritization of network configuration gaps.
At re:Inforce 2025, AWS debuted their AWS Shield Network Security Detector in Preview to simplify customers’ network security management. This tool provides AWS clients a consolidated dashboard where they can see their network resources and configuration issues from a single point to speed up incident response.
Another area where AWS aims ease their customers load is threat detection. AWS released an update to Amazon GuardDuty’s Extended Threat Detection to cover the Kubernetes Container environment. Boland gave an example of this update in action, describing how clients are now notified if there was a suspicious command execution within a container.
AWS also updated Amazon Inspector Code Security to assist developers in proactively addressing security vulnerabilities. Now, this tool allows developers to preview the security health of a code, including those from third-party repositories such as GitHub, before incorporating it into their organization’s operations.
Securing AI through teamwork
Lastly, as organizations are ramping up investments in AI — with 73% of businesses investing in AI-specific tools according to a 2024 Thales report — AWS clients are seeking expert support to secure these workloads. Boland highlighted how AWS has cultivated a network of partners that helps their APJ clients secure AI workloads, such as Palo Alto, Cisco, and CrowdStrike.
Boland additionally emphasized that security was an essential consideration in every layer of AWS’ Gen AI stack, which enables customers build their own Large Language Models (LLMs) and Foundation Models (FMs), access a selection of LLMs and FMs to build their own AI applications, or use turn-key AWS AI applications in their operations.
Specifically, he pointed out that Amazon Bedrock, their fully managed service that provides access to a selection of FMs to building their own AI applications, comes equipped with Guardrails. Amazon Bedrock’s Guardrails are configurable safeguards that clients leverage to safely build Gen AI applications at scale according to their own security requirements.
Boland held up how Grab, the Southeast Asian logistics super app, chose AWS for their Gen AI projects in 2023. The app utilized Amazon Bedrock’s Guardrails to ensure that their security needs were met for their AI features while keeping costs low. By May 2025, Amazon Bedrock’s Guardrails had been implemented throughout Grab’s critical products and services.
“AWS provides the most resilient cloud infrastructure, which our customers demand. We continue innovating by keeping costs manageable, and AWS and our partners help our customers implement Gen AI securely,” Boland concluded as he closed the briefing.
