Yes. The actual ssh keys to AWS servers will be very heavily guarded by people in AWS whose jobs are not to let anyone see.

They will not have any skin in the "middle managers" personal game and so his only other resort is straightforward hacking which he could do in your data center anyway.

Nah. The cloud is as safe as your data center - with the exception of bad apples at Amazon (same diff at your data center). Its servers, in data centers, virtualised.

At this level, I suspect you will not even multi tenant with others above a certain price point.

Amazon's external-facing security seems robust, but most places I've worked have given a lot of trust to people on the inside. I've worked at places where all developers get read access to all databases - and managers who are former developers usually retain that access.

Amazon might have good internal security procedures - but this stuff can't be audited effectively, we can only take amazon's word for it. Taking their word for it, with the security of all your customers' data, is a big ask.

That's not how it works. EC2 can't log in to your virts. S3 can't (trivially) read your unencrypted bits, and they certainly can't get to your ec2 dom0. Everything is pretty well firewalled. There's no back door access. If service A uses service B they hit the same public API as every other customer. Beyond that AMZN is really three companies; Amazon.com (retail), AWS, & Amazon Digital (kindle/vod/etc). That all said, you own your availability (and risk assessment etc).

Edit: " this stuff can't be audited effectively, we can only take amazon's word for it". Or a trusted third party. Go ask your aws sales rep about pci, fisma, etc.

Maybe

Things you can do:

- Use another provider

- Disk encryption / DB encryption

- Audit audit audit