Amazon promises further S3 price cuts as it touts cloud computing security

Amazon has revealed that another price drop for its Simple Storage Service (S3) is on the cards, following the cuts made at the beginning of February.

Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels, speaking at an event in central London on Tuesday, said the 12 per cent to 13 per cent reduction in storage costs offered to customers this year was only the beginning.

"At the beginning of the year, we dropped the storage pricing of S3 and some customers saw a 40 per cent drop in their bill," said Vogels…


"One thing you can expect from us is that we will continue to do this."

Vogels said Amazon aimed to give businesses an alternative to the storage products offered by on-premise software providers. Often these products are offered at lower prices if the customers commit to longer contracts, he added.

"Customers need to break from this model," said Vogels.

Amazon S3 recently announced that it had stored 762 billion objects by the end of 2011, a 192 per cent year-on-year growth since 2010 – the fastest growth since the service launch in 2006.

Vogels promised that the security of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud would continue to be the company’s chief priority.

While security concerns remain one of the key obstacles preventing businesses from taking to the cloud, Vogels insisted the AWS model offered more security than on-premise software architectures.

"We will always invest in security first," said Vogels, before drawing a comparison between the moats that protect castles, and the firewalls IT departments use to protect their internal application.

"We always knew that just having moats around your system was not secure. The bad thing about moats is that all your services and applications can be targeted if someone breaks in."

"All applications need to instead protect themselves. If you do any operations on the internet, security needs to be the priority."