AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Over the last two decades, the IT profession has developed new ways of working that are intended to deliver better business value more quickly and at lower risk. Or as Jonathan Smart of Barclay’s likes to say, “Better, Faster, Safer, Happier.”[1] There are buzzwords associated with these techniques, of course, as with everything in IT—in this […]

Jonathon Dixon, Global Head of Mining & Resources, Amazon Web Services Introduction by Thomas Blood, AWS Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist Until the 1930s, my family owned and operated gold, silver, and copper mines in Colorado. I have a fondness for mining, based on the stories my father shared with me about the people who extract […]

One strategy for enterprises looking to monetize their data and services is to offer an Application Programming Interface (API). This strategy has been used successfully in a range of companies, in industries including travel and – surprisingly, perhaps – banking. AWS offers a number of tools that can help not just in creating and operating […]

When meeting with security, risk, and compliance executives who have yet to start their cloud transformation or who already have multiple cloud workloads in AWS, I am often asked a version of the following question: “While we agree that the cloud is the new normal, it is different than running security on premise in the […]

Many of our large enterprise customers have this worry hanging over their heads … what are they going to do about that mainframe when they migrate? Workloads designed specifically for the cloud tend to focus on horizontal scalability – that is, as they need more and more processing power, they can add compute instances to […]

Today’s digital transformations pose a number of challenges, or certainly major changes, for finance professionals in enterprises. Yet finance is a critical player in these transformations and in the “transformed” enterprise. Enterprises must make decisions about what IT and digital capabilities to invest in, how to fund and account for those capabilities, how to budget […]

This post is the first in a multi-part series on how enterprises balance refactoring desires against time to value in cloud migrations. With cloud adoption becoming the new normal for the enterprise, the next-level debate is now about the specific approach to take when migrating to the cloud. While it is usually not difficult to […]

Transformations can be driven from all parts of an organization. What’s essential is passion, commitment, vision, and a willingness to take on challenges. Driving a substantial transformation in an established enterprise is difficult whether the change agent is in a senior role, somewhere in middle management, or a hands-on implementor: a software developer, infrastructure engineer, […]

In earlier posts in this series, I talked about the challenges and techniques of driving change from a senior position in the organizational chart (Driving Change from the Top Down: Wielding Organizational Powerand Top-Down Transformation: Shu-Ha-Ri to Go Beyond Command-and-Control) and from a middle management position (Transforming Up and Down: Leading Change from the Middleand […]

Tenet: (n) A principal or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy. These tenets are held by the group. To be a member in good standing, you are expected to hold to its particular teaching. In my role as an AWS Enterprise Strategist I travel the world working with leaders […]