Amazon has publicly debunked the story about Eli Lilly moving out of Amazon Web Services. In a Twitter message posted by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Amazon categorically state that Eli Lilly is still their customer.
For those following this anonymous source story this morning: Eli Lilly is still very much a customer and has not dropped their use of AWS
This response from Amazon was prompted by a post earlier by Searchcloudcomputing.com which claimed that Eli Lilly has backed out of AWS because they couldn’t get Amazon to indemnify them against network outages, security breaches and other forms of risk inherent in the cloud to Amazon Web Services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) poster child Eli Lilly has walked away from the cloud computing service after failing to come to terms over legal indemnification issues.
Sources close to Eli Lilly say the pharmaceutical giant was at its wits end trying to negotiate a contract with AWS that would push some accountability for network outages, security breaches and other forms of risk inherent in the cloud to Amazon Web Services. But these negotiations, sources said, got nowhere.
I would take Amazon at the face value now till Eli Lilly comes out and says otherwise. However, the issues raised by this article are still relevant and worth exploring. If Amazon is not willing to be accountable for issues like network outages, security breaches, etc., it is going to adversely affect the efforts by Amazon to lure enterprise customers into public clouds. I think it is important for Amazon to come out and discuss these issues in a transparent manner. 
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Krishnan Subramanian

Krish dons several avatars including entrepreneur in exile, analyst cum researcher, technology evangelist, blogger, ex-physicist, social/political commentator, etc.. My main focus is research and analysis on various high impact topics in the fields of Open Source, Cloud Computing and the interface between them. I also evangelize Open Source and Cloud Computing in various media outlets, blogs and other public forums. I offer strategic advise to both Cloud Computing and Open Source providers and, also, help other companies take advantage of Open Source and Cloud Computing. In my opinion, Open Source commoditized software and Cloud Computing commoditized computing resources. A combination of these two developments offers a strong competitive advantage to companies of all sizes and shapes. Due to various factors, including fear, the adoption of both Open Source and Cloud Computing are relatively slow in the business sector. So, I take it upon myself to clear any confusion in this regard and educate, enrich and advise users/customers to take advantage of the benefits offered by these technologies. I am also a managing partner in two consulting companies based in India. I blog about Open Source topics at http://open.krishworld.com and Cloud Computing related topics at http://www.cloudave.com.

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