Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday launched AppFabric, an app designed to simplify SaaS integration for enterprises by increasing application observability and reducing operational costs associated with building point-to-point solutions. announced a new no-code product called
Now generally available, the fully managed AppFabric product is designed to help enterprises maintain SaaS application interoperability without having to develop connectors and workflows in-house, while providing additional security capabilities. said Federico Toretti, Head of Product at AppFabric.
To connect multiple SaaS applications, companies must access the no-code AppFabric service via the AWS Management Console and create an application bundle of their choice, the company said, which includes authentication for all AppFabric applications. , capture, and encryption keys.
“When you create an app bundle, AppFabric creates the required AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role in your AWS account. This role sends metrics to Amazon CloudWatch and accesses such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Required to access AWS resources and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose,” AWS wrote in a blog post.
According to AWS, after creating an application bundle, AppFabric creates a standardized set of security and operational data for all connected apps, including activity logs that can be used for performance and security monitoring.
“Enterprises have been ingested by AppFabric and normalized into a single unified format using AWS’s Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) via applications from Splunk, Logz.io, Netskope, Netwitness and Rapid 7. We can run threat intelligence on the security data that has been collected,” Torretti said.
OCSF uses Apache Parquet and a proprietary open source-based schema to store security data.
Andy Thurai, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said security visibility across interconnected cloud applications is a key issue for cloud deployments, so AppFabric’s security capabilities make it easier for enterprises to do their jobs. increase.
However, analysts noted that many companies are using a combination of SIEM tools and smart SOC and NOC practices to avoid visibility issues.
AppFabric is available in AWS US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions and currently supports 12 SaaS applications, including Asana, Atlassian Jira suite, Dropbox, Google Workspace, and Microsoft . 365, according to the company. Other cloud regions will be available soon.
AWS offers a free tier for up to 100 users for the first 30 days. Afterwards, companies will have to pay AppFabric a fee of $3 per user per month, the company said, adding that the price reflects support for 30 applications.
Generative AI assistance across SaaS applications coming soon
While AppFabric security features are generally available, AWS will add “proactive” generative AI-based assistance, powered by Amazon Bedrock, to all supported SaaS applications by the end of this year. It’s being worked on, Torreti said.
“With AppFabric, we are shifting the paradigm in the application of generative AI from searching for knowledge to relying on reasoning capabilities and being action-oriented,” said Torreti. This assistance is expected to improve employee productivity by suggesting intelligent actions across supported SaaS applications.
However, the generative AI assistance does not feature a single window or prompt across all applications, but rather different toggle capabilities for each application, the company said.
“In Zoom, for example, generative AI doesn’t have prompts or windows, but shows intelligent suggestions for actions based on how a meeting or call progresses,” Toretti said.
According to the company, AWS AppFabric uses vector search, natural language processing, and large-scale language model internal tuning principles to provide generative AI assistance across all supported SaaS applications.
“As part of our architecture, we do three things: first, we model customer data prompts, second, we constantly evaluate and improve our prompts, and Finally, we are actively working to adapt our prompts to specific customer use cases,” said Torreti. , adds that AppFabric enriches the model’s context with up-to-the-minute data to keep the model from becoming stale.
According to the company, AppFabric understands the context of prompts and uses APIs to recommend actions that users can take across SaaS applications, such as tracking action items in project management tools.
AWS is also working to give companies more control over their in-app experience, for example allowing customers to provide custom instructions and rules for how AppFabric orchestrates actions across apps. Mr Toretti then said.
“This will allow customers to test and adjust instruction templates and conduct experiments that rethink employee productivity much more quickly than they do today,” Torretti added.
In recent months, vendors such as Salesforce, Slack, Google, and Microsoft, among others, have added generative AI-based assistants to their products.
“Companies are urging us to rethink how employees can interact with sprawling intelligence across apps so that they can access richer experiences across all the apps in which they created content.” We have been asking for it,” Treti said, adding that this will allow CIOs to establish the necessary governance across the company.
Gartner analyst Jim Hare said, “AWS has an opportunity to improve user productivity by offering a common Gen AI assistant as opposed to the multiple discrete assistants that most SaaS applications offer. We believe there is, enabling employees to get answers faster, automate task management, and generate insights faster.” .
According to Hare, AppFabric follows the same principles that AWS has adopted for its own supply chain offerings, integrating with various ERP and supply chain applications and using machine learning to give supply chain managers insight into inventory risk. is said to provide Analysts say AppFabric’s competitors include integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) products from Mulesoft, Tibco, Zapier, SnapLogic and Oracle.
