Product World

ProductWorld hosts its services on the Amazon Web Services platform Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2).  

Certification

Amazon Web Services is working with a public accounting firm to ensure continued Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance and attain certifications such as recurring Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70: Service Organizations, Type II (SAS70 Type II) certification.  These certifications provide outside affirmation that AWS has established adequate internal controls and that those controls are operating efficiently.  AWS will continue efforts to obtain the strictest of industry certifications in order to verify its commitment to provide a secure, world-class cloud computing environment.  The AWS platform also permits the deployment of solutions which meet industry-specific certification requirements.  For instance, AWS customers have built HIPAA-compliant healthcare applications using S3 and other components.

Physical Security

Amazon has many years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating large-scale data centers.  This experience has been applied to the AWS platform and infrastructure.  AWS data centers are housed in nondescript facilities, and critical facilities have extensive setback and military grade perimeter control berms as well as other natural boundary protection.  Physical access is strictly controlled both at the perimeter and at building ingress points by professional security staff utilizing video surveillance, state of the art intrusion detection systems, and other electronic means.  Authorized staff must pass two-factor authentication no fewer than three times to access data center floors.  All visitors and contractors are required to present identification and are signed in and continually escorted by authorized staff.

Amazon only provides data center access and information to employees who have a legitimate business need for such privileges.  When an employee no longer has a business need for these privileges, his or her access is immediately revoked, even if they continue to be an employee of Amazon or Amazon Web Services.  All physical and electronic access to data centers by Amazon employees is logged and audited routinely.

Backups

Data stored in Amazon S3, Amazon SimpleDB, or Amazon Elastic Block Store is redundantly stored in multiple physical locations as a normal part of those services and at no additional charge.  Data that is maintained within running instances on Amazon EC2, or within Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB, is all customer data and therefore AWS does not perform backups.

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