AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Live blog post from re:Invent 2018, Las Vegas One consistent theme in Werner Vogels’s keynote speech at re:Invent yesterday was that products designed for the cloud are very different from those designed for on-premises hardware. In the first waves of migration to the cloud and cloud-first delivery of new systems, it was natural for all […]

Live blog post from re:Invent 2018, Las Vegas As an AWS Enterprise Strategist I travel the globe talking to some of the largest enterprise customers on the planet about how they can truly innovate faster and deliver a much better customer experience by migrating their systems to AWS while in the process removing massive amounts […]

In many cases, enterprises that have undertaken a major move to the cloud first got started by learning and experimenting with the migration of a single application. This smaller step allowed them to gain confidence with the technology, economics, and skill sets that are part of a bigger leap into the cloud. But with hundreds […]

by Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining and Resources, Amazon Web Services Foreword by Thomas Blood: In a preface to another mining-related post, I had mentioned that until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in the United States. What I did not mention is why my family no longer owns […]

The world of traditional on-premises IT has become reasonably accurate at forecasting operating costs. We’ve been running IT in a very similar, familiar way for a long time, and we’ve become good at it. When adopting cloud, it can be helpful to reevaluate how we think about cost management, particularly around fixed-cost models and consumption-based […]

When I joined AWS just over a year ago, I was introduced to the concept of a “bar raiser.” In every interview process for a new employee, someone is designated as the bar-raiser—the person who will make sure that the new employee raises the bar for whatever function they will be performing. The bar raiser […]

In my role as an AWS Enterprise Strategist I am privileged to travel the globe working with amazing customers and their leadership teams. In nearly all of these encounters one of the questions, if not the first question is “What should my Target Operating Model be as we grow and use AWS Cloud?”. The TOM, […]

In previous blog posts I have described anti-patterns of enterprise IT that we often observe in enterprises we work with, and patterns of successful enterprise IT that are their antidotes. To make these patterns and anti-patterns more concrete, I will explain how they have played out at my old organization, US Citizenship and Immigration Services […]

An interesting question arose at one of my customer meetings recently. We were discussing the importance of innovation; in particular, how important it was for technology staff to stay abreast of new technologies to see whether they could add value to the enterprise. We agreed that current best practices suggest conducting rapid experiments to test […]

Enterprise leaders often ask us how to get started in digital transformation. The question usually comes after a discussion about the urgency of transformation and what a transformed enterprise looks like—the benefits of transformation and the business models it enables. At first, the journey seems long and involved; the changes dramatic and far-reaching. We often […]