Burton Group takes Amazon's EC2 to task

Analyst firm the Burton Group skewered Amazon's cloud computing service, saying it should not be used for applications that require advanced security and availability. The firm also accused Amazon of "will-not-discuss" policy when it came to specific details about its cloud data centers.

While Amazon has helped mold the cloud computing market with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Burton Group said the secrecy surrounding its cloud data centers prevents enterprises from determining the risk involved with putting their applications on it, according to a report titled "Amazon EC2: Is it ready for the enterprise?" written by analyst Drue Reeves.  

Amazon claims its data centers meet Tier 4 specifications,  which include redundant power, backup power, networking and HVAC systems.

"However, no outside firm has inspected or audited Amazon's data centers to verify these claims," Reeves wrote. "Due to lack of available information and audited inspection regarding Amazon's data centers, Burton Group cannot verify Amazon's availability claims."

An Amazon spokeswoman told Network World that the Burton Group's report includes inaccurate information, such as the firm's statement that Amazon doesn't support SAS 70 security certification when it does have that type of certification.

"In terms of reliability, we often hear from our customers that AWS [Amazon Web Services] can achieve higher degrees of performance than they've been able to achieve on their own," she said.

Last month, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targeted at a site hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) solution left the site down for 16 hours.

For more:
- check out this Network World article

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