AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

When I decided to move US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) into the cloud, I had a number of discussions with others in the federal IT community about cloud security. As the Authorizing Official—the person who had to sign off on the security of each system—for a component agency of the Department of Homeland Security, […]

Our Enterprise Strategy team meets with many hundreds of enterprise customers every year. We are able to see patterns in their digital transformations—ways of practicing and thinking about IT that work, and ways that don’t. In this post I will discuss some of the anti-patterns we encounter—IT mental models and traditional behaviors that just don’t […]

Working in the cloud is not just a matter of reducing costs once when you migrate your workloads. It is a matter of constant adjustment to gain all of the cost benefits that AWS makes available to you. We call this process cost optimization—the active oversight of costs as your organization and its market change, […]

As an Enterprise Strategist at AWS I get to work with executives from the world’s largest organizations as they drive digital transformation efforts. What may come as a surprise is that we tend to talk less about the technology and more about the people, processes, and culture needed to enable business transformation. A couple of […]

I promise this is not clickbait. In my last post, The Great Cloud Refactoring Debate, I introduced the Two-Week Rule as one example for enterprises planning a migration to the cloud. The Two-Week Rule is not a theoretical approach, but an actual cloud migration mechanism that we developed during my time at Edmunds.com to complete […]

  On July 2, I began a series of blog posts for CFOs interested in digital transformation. In this post, I’ll summarize where we are with the series. In researching and writing these posts I have learned a great deal about what CFOs are focused on, and I have realized that there are still a […]

You might say that humility is the essence of digital transformation. In the digital world, we are willing to be surprised and to learn. In the old days, we relied on a plan—prepared in advance—to guide our activities. The plan was made by someone, or some collection of someones, who knew enough to specify what […]

The time has passed when CFOs could focus only on cost control and financial reporting. A company’s finance function, in the digital world, is a driver of competitive advantage, of strategy, and of innovation. In a competitive environment, the winner will be the company that best acquires financial resources, invests those resources in the right […]

By Erin Carlson, AWS Product Marketing Manager Introduction by Mark Schwartz One of the advantages of the cloud is that it allows you to right-size your infrastructure continuously—to add infrastructure when you need it and release infrastructure and stop paying for it when you don’t. This gives enterprises new degrees of freedom in managing their […]

*Note: this post is not intended as accounting advice. It is about how to structure IT investments and make decisions about them, not how to account for them. Do IT projects have the characteristics of capital investments? I am not talking about their accounting treatment—that is outside my area of expertise. I am asking from […]