Amazon Cognito is a user management and authentication service provided by Amazon through Amazon Web Services:
Amazon Cognito lets you easily add user sign-up and sign-in to your mobile and web apps. With Amazon Cognito, you also have the options to authenticate users through social identity providers such as Facebook, Twitter, or Amazon, with SAML identity solutions, or by using your own identity system. In addition, Amazon Cognito enables you to save data locally on users devices, allowing your applications to work even when the devices are offline. You can then synchronise data across users devices so that their app experience remains consistent regardless of the device they use.
What you are effectively doing is storing your customer data in a closed system hosted by Amazon. If you are a company, such as a social network, who's data represents a significant asset within your organisation how to you ensure that this data is protected from:
- Amazon Cognito being shut down unexpectedly, i.e. at request from a law enforcement or government agency.
- Your access keys being compromised and some or all records being corrupted.
- The relationship between your organisation and Amazon breaking down to the point Amazon withdraws all services with immediate effect.
Amazon Cognito is a huge benefit to organisations and developers as it takes a particularly hard piece of software and makes it easy to implement; from a service operability perspective, we need to find ways to mitigate, remediate or accept risks to the companies assets at all times.