A summary of  how the IT department at Amazon prepared to 'drink own champagne' and buried somewhere is the importance of having it private.
 

Pressure
She is not an astronaut.  But put yourself in Jen Boden's shoes and there is no way to escape that cloud pressure.  Not if you are the director of IT services for the world's largest cloud provider, Amazon.com.
 

In a provocative but downplayed piece  (or maybe to deflect criticism this provides proof that early iteration of Amazon's cloud as 'not secure enough'), Carl Brooks gives as an eye-opener that many CIOs and IT departments can learn from.
 

Amazon gives us 5 things to consider when making the cloud switch

1. Moving to cloud computing is a business decision, not political or marketing mandate.  Target the project as a multi-year effort.
2. Server consolidation and virtualization are important initial steps.
3. Start with simple applications;  with financials as the last to move.
4. Do homework.  Execute risk assessment and take steps to evaluate cloud vendor.
5. Think hard and implement security at the application level, not just at operations.
 

Extra!  Bold private endorsement
In  statement that I didn't expect, the article quotes Ms Boden's apprehensions of oft-discussed security fears about the public cloud.  

" Boden said she was only able to give really serious consideration to moving critical parts of the organization into AWS after the launch of Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service last fall.  VPC allows users to deploy instances in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that are cut off from the public Internet. Amazon has advertised VPC, and a recently completed SAS 70 Type II security audit, as touchstones for enterprises."

I maybe left-field off here but does she also give the impression that 'if you really need to be secure, go private if you can' ?