Computing and storage cloud provider Amazon Web Services has launched a new security service, dubbed Amazon Macie, that automatically prevents data loss by discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data in AWS based on machine-learning algorithms, company officials announced during the AWS Summit in New York.

Amazon Macie recognizes sensitive data such as personally identifiable information or intellectual property and provides users with dashboards and alerts that give visibility into how this data is being accessed or moved. The fully managed service continuously monitors data access activity for anomalies and generates detailed alerts when it detects risk of unauthorized access or inadvertent data leaks.

Today, Amazon Macie is available to protect data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with support for additional AWS data stores coming later this year. Customers can enable Amazon Macie from the AWS Management Console and pay only for the gigabytes of Amazon S3 content classified and the AWS CloudTrail events analyzed.

The service can send all findings to Amazon CloudWatch Events and will support API endpoints through the AWS SDK later this year, allowing for robust interoperability with third-party solutions. Planned integrations include solutions from leading providers such as Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, Trend Micro, and more, allowing customers to easily incorporate intelligence from Amazon Macie into their existing security workflows for deeper analysis and forensics.

“When a customer has a significant amount of content stored in Amazon S3, identifying and classifying all of the potentially sensitive data can feel a bit like finding needles in a very large haystack — especially with monitoring tools that aren’t smart enough to effectively automate what is now a very manual process,” said Stephen Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer, Amazon Web Services. “Amazon Macie approaches information security in a more intelligent way. By using machine learning to understand the content and user behavior of each organization, Amazon Macie can cut through huge volumes of data with better visibility and more accurate alerts, allowing customers to focus on securing their sensitive information instead of wasting time trying to find it.”