Breaking with other players in the IT industry, Amazon’s CTO has downplayed any impact of the Edward Snowden revelations on its international business.
“Growth outside the US is as strong as it ever was,” CTO Werner Vogels said in an onstage interview at the Gigaom Structure conference in San Francisco.
Cisco and a few other vendors have complained that revelations about surveillance by the National Security Agency have eroded trust in US technology firms overseas, harming their businesses. Cisco CEO John Chambers even complained to President Barack Obama, after reports that the NSA had intercepted routers en route to customers to plant surveillance tools.
Those concerns have not affected Amazon and may even have helped the company, according to Vogels, because it leads to a conversation about the security of its platform.
He maintained that Amazon security tools like Cloud HSM allow customers to protect access to their data. “If you encrypt your data, you’re the one who has full control over it,” he said.
That seems an over-simplification, however, given the revelations about how the NSA has interfered with encryption standards. Still, Vogels said 70% of the top 40 public companies in France use Amazon Web Services.
The CIA is a customer, too. Vogels was asked if the intelligence agency’s $600 million (€441 million) contract with AWS gets it access to a “private cloud” — hardware that is not shared with other customers.
Vogels was reluctant to discuss the deal but seemed to confirm it does. “I’d call it a members only cloud,” he said.
Asked if further regulation to harmonise data protection laws globally seems inevitable, Vogels said any disruption from regulations can be minimised through good design.
“I’ve yet to see a privacy regulation that can’t be met by following good architecture principles,” he said.
But ultimately, Vogels said, security tools provide better protection in the cloud than laws and regulations. “If someone [wants to] break into your house, you don’t need a good lawyer, you need a good lock,” he said.
James Niccolai, IDG News Service
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers