Why Amazon's Werner Vogel is wrong about cloud security

Werner Vogel, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CTO, speaking at the AWS Summit in London yesterday has made the rather amazing claim that security in the cloud is "much stronger" than anything you can have on-premises. As someone who has been writing about information security for more than 20 years, and covering the cloud security beat for five, I can understand why he may say that. However, it doesn't mean that he was right; not for every customer, not for every implementation. If you are talking about the smaller end of the SME spectrum then, for the most part in my experience, there's a very good chance that the kind of dedicated security know-how and infrastructure investment available from the likes of AWS is beyond the reach of the average business. If you are talking about larger enterprises, which do have dedicated security teams and have already invested heavily in the relevant infrastructure and processes, well sorry Werner but that's a totally different ballpark.