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 at the cards, following the cuts made at first 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 start.

“Initially of the year, we dropped the storage pricing of S3 and a few customers saw a 40 per cent drop of their bill,” said Vogels.

“Some thing you could expect from us is that we’ll continue to do that.”

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

“Customers ought to break from this model,” said Vogels.

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

Vogels promised that the safety of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud would remain the company’s chief priority.

While security concerns remain some 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’re going to always put money into security first,” said Vogels, before drawing a comparison between the moats that protect castles, and the firewalls IT departments use to give protection to their internal application.

“We always knew that just having moats around your system was not secure. The bad thing about moats is that every one your services and applications may be targeted if someone breaks in.”

“All applications must instead protect themselves. In case you do any operations on the web, security ought to be the concern.”

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