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Hybrid IT? Not a long-term thing, says AWS CTO

Cloud security now ‘much stronger than on-premises’

Security ... pah!

Meanwhile, cloud security, added Vogels, is not a concern. "Security in the cloud is much stronger than any of our customers can have on-premises. AWS is the best place to store your data, if you want to have full control over who has access to it."

The reasons he gave included a depth of security expertise that smaller organisations can't match, encryption and key management tools, and a range of certifications from authorities including the EU.

The AWS approach to hybrid IT contrasts to that from other cloud providers, particularly with Microsoft, with its legacy of on-premises systems and partners who supply and maintain them.

Part of Microsoft's pitch for its Azure cloud is that you can install the Azure Pack within an on-premises system and get many of the benefits of cloud computing from your own systems.

AWS on the other hand does not offer private cloud, and what it calls "Amazon Virtual Private Cloud" actually runs on its public cloud infrastructure.

Commitment to public cloud frees Amazon to be more radical and innovative in the technology behind its services. The Aurora database service now in preview, for example, is designed and optimized for a massive distributed infrastructure that cannot be replicated unless you have Amazon-like scale.

Still, while there are good reasons to use public cloud, there are also reasons for caution, and the number of large organisations that are "all in" is currently small.

AWS is growing fast though — usage is up around 100 per cent, year-on-year, for both S3 storage and EC2 computing, Vogels said, which means increasing numbers of IT systems now have a dependence on it.

As AWS grows, the consequences should AWS suffer an extended global outage or other calamity become correspondingly more severe. But that could never happen, right? ®

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