Following accusations by US lawmakers that Amazon has not done enough to secure data on its servers, a senior executive in the company has clarified that the web giant’s cloud computing customers have to decide themselves how best to protect sensitive information online.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com, has come under the scanner following a series of high-profile data breaches, including one this year involving the personal information of 106 million people stored on its servers by Capital One Financial.
“AWS provides multiple services to help customers identify if their data was being stored appropriately and flag any possible problems, but the decision about which settings to use lay with those clients,” said Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels. "We feel we have a responsibility in making sure you take the right actions, but in the end it's only you who can decide what is the right action there and what's not," he told the media on the sidelines of the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.
He further added that customers should use tighter security controls for sensitive data such as credit card information. "I'm not going to look at your data thinking like 'hey, these are cat videos, maybe you shouldn't do that'."
Vogels said the AWS system warned customers with a "massive red button" when they configured online storage containers - known as buckets - to be accessible by anyone online, a setting deliberately chosen for some products and applications.
The company also provides tools which clients can run to analyse the type of data they are storing and spot commonly associated slip-ups, he said.
"If you (change) the configuration on your bucket to world-readable, you will get lots of alarm bells going off," he said. "It's up to the individual customer to decide what's right and what's wrong."
Cyber-security researchers say because the company’s clients configure their security settings, data hosted on AWS servers is often accidentally gets exposed.
See What’s Next in Tech With the Fast Forward Newsletter
Tweets From @varindiamag
Nothing to see here - yet
When they Tweet, their Tweets will show up here.