Glossary: Business Risk, Third Parties and Compliance

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Also written: AWS, Amazon EC2, EC2, Amazon Compute Service Level Agreement

Amazon's cloud computing platform, which rents out services such as EC2 virtual servers that customers use in place of their own hardware. Its EC2 service-level agreement (SLA) promises at least 99.99% monthly uptime per region and pays only service credits toward future bills when it falls short, not compensation for a customer's lost sales; its testing policy lets customers penetration test their own resources but not AWS's infrastructure or other customers, and forbids denial-of-service testing without approval.