> You can trust Amazon to be better at security than you are.
Unless you have more access to Amazon internals than everybody else, then you can't really know that for sure. Even if you did, it's only true if you've decided to let it be that way. There's nothing stopping a company from hiring great security people, and implementing their own great security.
Also, there are many scenarios, like a defense contractor handling sensitive information, where I would expect the the in-house (or in-government, I guess) security to be a lot better than Amazon's.
> There's nothing stopping a company from hiring great security people, and implementing their own great security.
Money.
We can afford to pay Amazon for their services and reap the benefits of their security investment and experience as part of the purchase.
We can't afford to hire someone to be dedicated to security.
If you're a small business, and/or security isn't one of the core components of your business, chances are you'll make better use of your security 'budget' (or lack thereof) dollar-for-dollar by paying Amazon.
I've also worked for a defense contractor, and the company I worked for, and the facility I worked at, took securing classified information very seriously. The consequences for screwing it up can literally be prison time, so I'm really surprised to hear the company you worked for didn't take it more seriously.
In this specific case, it doesn't sound like the "sensitive Pentagon Files" were classified at all, though, so it's probably not as big of a deal as the article is making it out to be.
Unless you have more access to Amazon internals than everybody else, then you can't really know that for sure. Even if you did, it's only true if you've decided to let it be that way. There's nothing stopping a company from hiring great security people, and implementing their own great security.
Also, there are many scenarios, like a defense contractor handling sensitive information, where I would expect the the in-house (or in-government, I guess) security to be a lot better than Amazon's.